How To Drive A Design Sprint Effectively
Running a Design Sprint seems like a super daunting task ā I mean, 5 freaking days?! What am I going to do with all that time?!
Well, the truth is, it isnāt all that hard! First of all, my obvious recommendation is for you to read the original book Sprintā Thank you, Jake Knapp. The original idea was laid out in the book, so itās your best source of knowledge (yes, even better than this article š ).
We want to turn false confidence into validated confidence before beginning an expensive build. Or, we want to dodge bullets by learning we shouldnāt begin the costly build at all.
Sprints are useful starting points when kicking off a new product or workflow, as well as solving problems with an existing product. They typically last 5 days, but we have done them in less time. We get as many stakeholders and experts in the room as we can.
Design sprints are test-driven design.
Letās start by explaining the phases we go through when we run a Design Sprint. If you donāt know what Design Sprint is, I would recommend reading my other article first:
Design Thinking
Design Thinking combines empathy, creativity, and rationality to solve human-centered problems. It is the foundation on which a Design Sprint is built.
Empathy
With Design Thinking, we use empathy to see the world through our customersā eyes and understand their problems as they experience them. There may be many technological, financial, political, religious, human, and social and cultural forces involved. It is our job to develop a holistic understanding of these problems and effects and contextualize them in a higher world schema.
In addition to our own perspective, we aim to understand the perspectives of as many other people as possible to diversify our understanding better.
Empathy is the primary focus of Phase 1 (Understand) and a significant part of Phase 5 (Test and Learn). We should aim to always to maintain empathy when solving problems and building products for humans.
Creativity
Creativity is an opportunity for discovery. We use creativity to generate insights and solution concepts.
Unique insights and intersecting perspectives inspire the most creative solutions. Empathy, as described above, empowers our ability to understand different perspectives and be more creative. Collaboration encourages creativity. More perspectives, ideas, and insights lead to more opportunity.
Rationality
We use rationality to fit solutions to the problem context through experimentation, testing, and qualitative/quantitative measurements.
Design Thinking should pervade all of our processes outside the design sprint as well, from engineering to marketing to business development.
In a complex business ecosystem, design thinking can be used as a holistic approach to facilitating and maintaining a symbiotic relationship with your customers.
The Sprint Phases
A typical length for a project kick-off sprint is five days, with each day representing a different phase. This timeframe is not rigid and should adapt to the specific needs of the problem. For example, some phases may need more than a full day and others may need less.
The aim is to develop a product or feature idea into a prototype that can be tested to help us fill our riskiest knowledge gaps, validate or invalidate our most dangerous assumptions and guide future work.
āMost people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think itās this veneer ā that the designers are handed this box and told, āMake it look good!ā Thatās not what we think design is. Itās not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.ā ā Steve Jobs
Phase 1: Understand
Develop a common understanding of the working context including the problem, the business, the customer, the value proposition, and how success will be determined. By the end of this phase, we also aim to have identified some of our most significant risks and started to make plans for reducing them.
Phase 2: Diverge
Generate insights and potential solutions to our customerās problems. Through a series of rapid creative exercises, we can develop and question functionality, challenges, and solutions. This phase is crucial to innovation and marketplace differentiation.
This gives us a baseline of ideas and visuals with which to evaluate and identify potentially viable solutions in the next phases.
Phase 3: Converge
Take all of the possibilities exposed during phases 1 and 2, eliminate the wild and currently unfeasible ideas and hone in on the ideas we feel the best about. We come up with a realistic prototyping storyboard and develop an assumptions table to guide our prototyping and testing phases.
Customers respond positively to a simple, clean aesthetic positive body language, longer engagement times with content. When asked, provided an example of how we could help them. When asked, they gave us an outline of our process.
Phase 4: Prototype
Build a prototype that can be tested with existing or potential customers. The prototype should be designed to learn about specific unknowns and assumptions. Its medium should be determined by time constraints and learning goals. Figma and pure HTML/CSS are all excellent prototyping tools.
For mobile prototyping, we frequently prototype one-off interactions in Figma too. This is great for proof-of-concept when handing off a static design that might not otherwise be clear. Try clicking on the feed items in the iPhone.
Phase 5: Test and Learn
Test the prototype with existing or potential customers. It is critical to test with current or potential customers because they are the ones you want your product to work and be valuable for. Their experiences with the problem and knowledge of the context have an influence on their interaction with your product that non-customers wonāt have.
Conclusion:
With this article, we hope that Design Sprints became less daunting for you! Once you get into them, youāll notice that arenāt that hard ā at all!
If you want to know when and why you should run a Design Sprint, check out our other articles:
PS: If you stick to the end, we will reward you! We would love to share with you this company ā AJ&Smart; they inspired us to upgrade our process to the Design Sprint 2.0, itās 4 days with same or even better results!
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Ricardo is the CEO of PICUS. Obsessed with becoming āDesign Sprint Go-to-Guyā in Portugal. He organizes meetups at his hometown, occasional speaker, and overall a tech enthusiast. Follow him on LinkedIn or Instagram!
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