Day 4 Summary. The purpose of Day 4 in a design sprint is all about
- preparing the prototype
- putting in the content and visual details to make the prototype look and feel real and ‘fake it’
- identifying what needs to be tested and validated
All of this feeds into deciding on Day 5, Friday, what to continue, where we need to pivot, and what to kill
…… The following article provides a list of notes, quick tips, and the actual ‘executed’ agenda from our 5-day remote product design sprint. It also assumes there is already a baseline understanding of the traditional design sprint process and we are just summarizing our variations and call outs for this specific remote design sprint experience.
Context
- Healthcare tech startup needs to decide scope for MVP and 1 or 2 killer capabilities that will differentiate them in the market (1 target persona)
- Participants: CEO. Chief Revenue Officer. COO. Engineer. Product. Designer
- 5-day remote design sprint
- Tools: Zoom, Mural, Figma, Slack, Spotify
- 3 user tests (B2B)
Notes and Tips
Day 4 was the most exciting for the group. It was the day of ‘YES’ for our sprint. Lots of Yes’ and head-nodding happened via Zoom. Kandis O’Brien again took the lead for the day, but this was also the day for our designers to shine.
- Remote activities. The participants broke off into their own teams and sessions for building the final storyboard activity. This proved to be a little difficult since they were not sitting next to each other drawing. In this sprint, we still opted for hand drawing on paper versus using a digital tool. One person would draw for the team, they reviewed in Zoom and/or Mural and then continued to hand draw.
- Designers. We had two designers support the day. One attended the entirety of the sprint as he was new to the company and would ideally takeover the effort post sprint. We also had our own designer participate Wednesday afternoon and all day Thursday.
- Teaser. During the morning session, we had the designers share a landing page teaser to get the group excited. They were super anxious about seeing what the platform would look like coming out of this effort based on the Wednesday Sketches. We shared the prototype via Figma which they were blown away by. (this is a risky move and definitely could have gone in a different direction)
- The prototype is not the final design. We set the context that the prototype is designed to be disposable. It’s great if the team likes the design concepts, but it is more important to focus on the details needed for testing.
- Speeding up the Prototype. The startup did not have a pattern library yet so we used some Figma starter kits the developer team was already using to get the design team going. The designers definitely added their own flair but this enabled them to focus on execution rather than obsess on design elements.
- Areas we were able to accelerate. In an effort to make up for the lost time we pre-built the storyline for the storyboards and pre-populated the test objectives and questions for the team to give them a jump start on each of those exercises on this day.
- Playlist. U2, Lenny Kravitz, Weezer, Sir Sly, and Weezer
Day 4 Agenda (adjusted based on actuals)
Retrospective 10:00–10:05am
Storyboarding 10:30 -12:00pm
…… Break 12:00 -12:30pm
Designing the Details 12:30 - 2:30pm
…… Break 2:30 - 3:00pm
Build Test Scripts 3:00 - 3:30pm
Retrospective (On your own)
Designer sync up 8:00 - 9:00pm
Team Retrospective Summary
I Like…
- Seeing the designs, getting to the prototype
- The facilitators pre-populating of the storyboard to speed us along
- The teamwork, how we built on top of each other’s ideas
I Wish…
- Thursday (prototype) happened on Tuesday
- We could prototype/build everything
I Wonder…
- If we can incorporate calendar integration
- How the users will react
- If this process led us to success or we could have gotten here sooner
- How much of what we created will be incorporated into the requirements
Resources
- Digital templates from New Haircut’s Toolkit
Follow us for more notes and be sure to check out our latest free templates and tools LINK
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We are The SIX, a women-founded and owned strategy and innovation firm. Feel free to ask questions, challenge, and share new ideas and frameworks in the comments section below. To learn more about us visit us at www.the-six.co
