Design Sprints: A first glance
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Often times, when you start a new project or maybe have to solve a particular problem, you’re feeling like running uphill or climbing a mountain. It even feels like conquering a lost castle, that once belonged to your ancestors.
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a wandering King that really had a problem. And wanted with all his heart to regain his rightful heirship. What was left of his kin, was a small band of devout warriors, and a dream. A dream to win back his kingdom. A kingdom that was built by the sweat and blood of his ancestors.
Having little help, he reached out to a wizard, as it seemed he’d be a good choice to help him out in this great endeavour.
The King explained his pain to the wizard, that he’d want to attain his castle under the mount and rule over the lands his family left him. But there was a big problem — a big, fire-breathing, armour-like scales problem. A greedy dragon has made a home in the treasury of the castle.
So the wizard had assembled the small company at a hobbits house, the one he thought will help the king in this perilous journey.
Often times, kings don’t come to us asking for help, bearing an ancient map with riddles to be solved, but customers and clients want to solve different problems or customer needs.
What we do is we assemble the team — not the artillery, or cavalry — but battle-proven designers, developers, and marketers, that gather around and help the customer to define the challenge, and the treasure at the end of the quest — or in design sprint jargon, the Design Sprint Goal. Though not as drama-filled or full of action as the Hobbit movie, The Design Team, through various research methods, iterations and validations, frame the problem, design solutions and test a solution at the end of a Design Sprint.
Leaving the mystery a bit behind, let’s sketch together what exactly such a method of problem-solving looks like. So here’s the process:
- Define the Challenge. During the first day, through Expert Interviews, you’ll set the Long term Goal, and explore solutions with the help of the User Story Map.
- Ideate and Sketch based on the possible solutions. The team will decide and create the Storyboard of the Prototype based on that decision.
- Creating “The Prototype” — the team selects the Keyscreens, which will be sketched out in The Prototype.
- Test the prototype to created with potential users. Don’t forget to schedule your User Interviews beforehand and summarise all the User Testing Feedback in your summary report.
Key roles during the Design Sprint.
- The Moderator: she’s in charge of making sure that the Design Sprint team gets from exercise to exercise within the allotted time so that the process will actually reach the end within a 4-day timeline. Can’t start a Design Sprint without a Moderator.
- The Decider — CEO or Product Owner/Manager. The one who is making calls for the product, company or idea that is the focus of the Design Sprint. They have the ultimate voting power during the voting processes in the first 2 days of the processes.
- The Experts: team members who will be involved in the first day of the Design Sprint. They can be cross-company team members, from Sales, Finance, Customer Success, Engineering or Marketing. Day 1 kicks off with Expert Interviews, to really get insight and appreciation for the company’s challenges.
Defining the Challenge
As Dwalin or Bilbo Baggins, or other brave dwarves have asked during their adventure, Sprint Team Members ask the Sprint Questions, such as “What obstacle do you foresee that can block us on from capturing the Kingdom under the Mountain?” or “What can block us from achieving 1 million users in 2 years?”. These questions help us to discover, what possible roadblocks we could find around the way, the like of goblins or maybe customers not understanding the service.
Maps are usually part of on adventure, as one would expect. Though not wrapped in the same mystery as Thorin’s, at the beginning of the sprint, the team identifies the actors, user journey and the end goal of a particular user journey. It’s helpful to represent each stage that a customer passes until he reaches the goal.
Ideating and Sketching
Having a defined method, the team is forced to create solutions, through the four-step sketch method. Having a set goal, the team jots down the notes, ideas and crazy 8s — each team member sketches out eight different variations of your strongest solution.
Creating “The Prototype”
Remember that we have sketches from all of the sprinters? Well, now you have to decide together what is the best approach to solving your problem.
Through heat maps and dot voting, each sketch is reviewed by each participant and casts their votes on the displayed proposals. The most voted proposal will be sketched out on the whiteboard into a Story Board. Here’s just an example of how a cell might look like:
Once you’ve drawn out the storyboard, focus the day before the User Testing developing the prototype. You can create it using PowerPoint, Sketch and import it into a tool like Invision.
Test it with Users
Before recruiting Testers and scheduling interviews, you’ll have to agree on a Target Demographic. You won’t need a whole lot, but at least 5, according to this Nielsen article. The interviews can be recorded or not, but be on the lookout for patterns and themes that your testers will do or speak.
Conclusions
Though not a one-size-fits-all, the processes during a Design Sprint helps a team to fail fast, learn fast. At the end of a sprint, you’ve made fast and critical decisions, that help guide the next steps of an organisation to the next big hairy audacious dwarf — sorry, goal.
Here at Wolfpack Digital, we don’t have hobbits, but a team of experienced UXers, developers, and product people that can’t promise to help you meet Smaug, but for sure we can help you ideate, prototype, validate and build the products real customers need and want.
And here we are at the end of the article, such a bummer, I know, but hopefully, it was useful and made you think about the role of UX in today’s competitive market. Stay curious!
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