3 Day Design Sprint: UX Triage

Focused 3 days of design goodness.

The desired outcome of any design sprint is to produce a focused set of work around a set of features for development. We will step thru a few activities that will help us work down a thought process funnel.

These methods are developed to help us work through the scope and end with understood, actionable designs.

Scope the Feature

Needs/Wants/Desires

1. Idea Dump — The first activity is to dump every possible idea about a feature into a pool. This can be stickies on a board, whiteboard list, trello list, or any method that allows the entire team to see all of the ideas in one spot. Encourage any idea to be captured from the generic to very specific requirements.
2. Idea Categorization — After all ideas are captured group the ideas by similarities. It can be any type of category, based on where, how, what, when or who. A few examples could be ideas relative to back end, relating to interactions, or around a common theme.
3. Idea Prioritization — Put the categories or ideas in priority. Usual priority is based on need for first users over relation to the end goal.

Here is where you use the literal groups of Must/Should/Could. Use these to separate the ideas based on these.

• Must — critical to v1 release
• Should — highly desired for v1
• Could — could wait for v1.1

Understand the workflow

Look at the experience, not the screens

These maps are meant to help visualize the connections between what a user can see and what they can do. Here we use only general terms for what they see and action verbs to describe what they can do.

Users can’t “login” as a Do, they “submit valid info”. As we don’t know at this step what the requirements are for the submission of the valid info. We define this later.

See|Do Map — This map is not a site map it is a workflow map. We design the connections between the objects here. Don’t forget sad paths.