<p>Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/intro-to-design-sprints-f7fa6804b613?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Skjoldbroder </p>
<h4>TL;DR — A design sprint is a 5-day feedback loop where you can find a few answers to big questions. It’s a quick way to reduce uncertainty and increase the odds that you’re going in the right direction.</h4>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*uvL_4YTJWZ_uwCliT79m9g.jpeg">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/L9VXW4A9QZM?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">Charlotte Coneybeer</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></p>
<h3>So what is a design sprint, anyway?</h3>
<p>First off, it might be helpful to outline what a design sprint is NOT:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Not</em> an empty buzzword — when done right, obviously 🙂</li>
<li><em>Not</em> a solution to all your problems</li>
<li><em>Not</em> the only way of working. It’s one tool among many.</li>
<li><em>Not</em> a way to come up with product specs</li>
<li><em>Not</em> like a SCRUM sprint (i.e. a method for continuous delivery*)</li>
</ul>
<p>So what is it?<strong> A design sprint is a way to learn</strong>. It’s a feedback loop, or a “learning loop”. As such, the end product of a design sprint is <em>answers. </em>How good those answers are will depend on how good your question is, how well you ask it, and how well you <em>listen</em>.</p>
<h3>Find your question, ask it — listen!</h3>
<p>The design sprint process** at a (very) high level goes something like this:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Find your question. </strong>Identify a specific thing you want to learn about, and focus on the heart of the matter. For example: <em>“Will customers understand and desire this new product we’re going to make?”.</em></li>
<li><strong>Create a way to ask</strong>. Figure out how to make a convincing (but fake) version of whatever you are trying to learn about*** — The key here is that it should be convincing<em>, </em>so that people buy into the illusion. There are <a href="https://www.google.dk/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiGzKDA0tDXAhXoZpoKHdxdDKwQFggoMAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pretotyping.org%2Fuploads%2F1%2F4%2F0%2F9%2F14099067%2Fpretotype_it_2nd_pretotype_edition-2.pdf&amp;usg=AOvVaw01tikKUNFvgDiRpI7RMYwS">many ways</a> of going about this.****</li>
<li><strong>“Ask the question” — and listen!</strong> When people try something out, you get an unfiltered and immediate reaction from them. It’s the difference between <em>experiencing</em> something and reflecting on how such an experience might be. One is immediate and direct, the other is not. <br />This is important: simply asking people what they think, will make people <em>reflect </em>and consider all sorts of things (like “what would be the appropriate thing to say”, “what would the interviewer like to hear”, etc). Instead, simply make people <em>experience</em> and <em>react</em> to what you made. This should be your first and best way of “asking” in a design sprint! After you’ve seen their reaction, you can ask them about their opinion and reflections.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Run a design sprint when you have big questions</h3>
<p>You should consider running a design sprint if you have big questions you need answered, risky assumptions, or if you’re stuck between multiple approaches you can’t decide between. If you don’t quite know whether your plan will take you in the right direction. In other words — you should run a design sprint when you need to <em>learn</em>!</p>
<h3>User feedback is a must-have</h3>
<p>Without users giving you feedback you can learn from, the entire design sprint is obviously pointless. So put some effort into recruiting and interviewing, and above all: listen well to both words and deeds of your users. A key takeaway here should also be: user feedback is good in general, and you should pretty much get it whenever you can.</p>
<h3>The sprint team are both ressource and obstacle</h3>
<p>Putting a group of people together and meshing their ideas together into one coherent whole is always difficult (forming, norming, storming and all that). We are individuals, after all! It’s also difficult to avoid groupthink. Jake Knapp included some good methods for dealing with those kinds of things in his book about the design sprint — so just follow the recipe and you should be fine.</p>
<p>Another hard thing which might actually be harder than it sounds, is finding out what people think. You pull people in, and make them try out what you built, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to end up with crystal clear answers to all your questions. Like with everything else — you’re going to have to use your judgement and analytical skills to find meaning in what you’re seeing and hearing. As a group! This is hard because people hear different things, mY suffer confirmation biases, and suffer from groupthink.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*eLh3RMn5Utc4swuLXCAyzw.jpeg">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/P2KJiJRjzq4?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">KAP Jasa</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></p>
<h3>Products consist of many hundreds or thousands of small decisions. A design sprint only enables you to make a few of those decisions</h3>
<p>This is why a design sprint won’t result in fully fledged product specifications, ready for development. It’s also why it’s supremely important to focus on the most important questions / the riskiest assumptions / the biggest unknowns, and why you might need to run more than one sprint.</p>
<h3>Thanks for reading! 🙂</h3>
<p>I wrote this mainly as a reflection after yet another design sprint. Every time we do a sprint, it becomes clearer what works and what doesn’t — and why! It becomes easier to see how modifications of parts of the “official” design sprint process can pull the outcome in various directions, both good and bad. And it becomes easier to see what the underlying principles are. Practice makes perfect, as they say 🙂</p>
<p>* Ironically, development in Scrum is less like sprinting, and more like running a marathon. Sprints in scrum are deliberately designed to be a sustainable way to do development over the long-term. <em>Design sprints</em>, on the other hand, are very aptly named, since they are a short, high-intensity effort to reach a concrete goal.</p>
<p>** Read the book for specifics</p>
<p>*** This could be many things.. you could make fake marketing materials to test out how people understand and react to a product offering. You could mock up a physical location to test whether customers feel at home in the location. You could build a fake app to test whether customers find it enjoyable to use — and so on.</p>
<p>**** One example comes from IBM, who tested whether users would desire a speech-to-text system. They tested it by placing a computer with a microphone in one room, and a skilled typist in another room. Users bought into the illusion of interacting with a computer system which perfectly transcribed everything they said. In reality it was all fake, but IBM learnt that users quickly tired of speaking to a computer.</p>
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<hr>
<p><a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/intro-to-design-sprints-f7fa6804b613">Intro to Design Sprints</a> was originally published in <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io">Prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>


Intro to Design Sprints

TL;DR — A design sprint is a 5-day feedback loop where you can find a few answers to big questions. It’s a quick way to reduce uncertainty and increase the odds that you’re going in the right direction.…

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