Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Resul Caner Yıldırım

Hello everyone! In this series, I’d like to share my experiences with you based on Design Sprints I had with more than 25 startups from Turkey and abroad.

I hope these series help you to prevent making the same mistakes we did in the past.

Design Sprint @ Ankara / 2017

Before I tell you the problems we faced during our design sprints, let’s have an introduction for those who don’t have any idea about the Design Sprints.

“A Design Sprint, basically, is a flexible framework that helps you to solve big problems or answering big questions regarding a new idea in a short time period.”

We make the Design Sprints in order to reduce the risk of failure for solving a problem, trying a new idea or answering a big question.

That’s why every Design Sprint should have a unique theme and focus on solving specific ideas or a set of problems.

Contrary to what is believed, the main purpose of a Design Sprint is not prototyping your idea. The main purpose of this process is to test and improve your idea with your team and validate it with real people that use -or might use- your product. This way, a Design Sprint can change your perspective on the idea, question or the problem.

From my perspective and the methods that I use, a Design Sprint broken into 5 steps; Understand, Diverge, Decide, Prototype and Validation.

Credits: Eventosaur

Each step is to answer different questions about your idea or problem. In every single part of a design sprint, you need to focus on your teammates’ ideas. That way you can fully understand what you’re doing and also these steps will lead you to create a variety of answer that can solve your problem. Starting from next week, I’ll post detailed posts to share my all experiences with every step of Design Sprint.

Now, let’s get prepared for our first/next design sprint before we learn more things about every step of design sprint.

Define Your Goals & Challenges

Like I said before, a design sprint should have a theme. Before you gather your team you need to create a brief template to make sure everyone knows what will happen in this sprint. This brief template should outline the scope of your design sprints like your key goals and challenges.

Here is a template that you can use to get you started.

Conduct Research

After you define your scope and prepare your brief, I advise you to conduct a research about your product and your users. This research might contain netnography research, analytic results, and feedback from your users. This research will help you in the next days of your sprint.

Research Before The Design Sprint — 2017 / Turkey — Burak Özkurt

For example, on the last project that I work on for a while, we had a trip to our customer service department -which is located in a different city of Turkey- to get some insights from the team about our customers’ behavior. Because they were the first contact point for our customers and they know their pains better than us most of the time.

Choose The Team

As always, you need a good team to make a successful Design Sprint. I suggest you make the Design Sprint with a diverse group of people to get the best context and insights from different people who work in different departments of your company. That way, you can expand your vision as a team while solving the big problem.

When you expand your vision and change your perspective on design sprints like that, you’ll realize a successful design sprint should have at least 5 attendants who specialized on different areas to give you the most effective insights.

Credits: Giphy

On every design sprint, you need a sprint master and facilitators to navigate your team. That person might be one of you or a stranger. For an ideal team, you need a User Researcher, a UX Designer, a Product Manager, 1–2 Developers (Or Engineers) and a Decision Maker who will accept or reject your outcomes during the sprint. But, of course, it is possible to make a design sprint with more or less people.

Duration

The other important part of a design sprint is the duration. Normally, a design sprint should take 5 days. I know it is really hard to gather up a bunch of people from your team for 5 days to solve a problem. But when you think about the results; having a focused team for 5 days is much better and effective than having a team that thinks about the same problem at different times.

Prepare Your Agenda & Deck

After you gather up your team and tell them that you’ll have a design sprint, It is necessary to have a well-planned agenda. A well-planned agenda will lead you to move on problems faster and more meaningful. Also, your agenda must be solid. If you change your agenda during your sprint, you’ll fail on the most part of it. So, don’t change your agenda under any conditions.

Design Sprint @ Almaty — Kazakhstan / 2017

Creating a clear and easy to understand design sprint deck is also important as much as having a good agenda. Create a neat presentation deck to follow your agenda and also, try to add some short lightning talks between daily tasks. This will improve your creativity also makes you easy to concentrate.

Venue & Supplies

The last but not least part of the preparation is the venue and supplies. I suggest you have a flexible and open place to host your design sprint. An open and flexible room will give you the opportunity for gathering as a team on every step of the design sprint. If it’s possible, try to find or create a room with writable/drawable walls or a room full of whiteboards. You need to use your markers on walls or boards to share your idea with your teammates. This is a must.

Design Sprint @ İzmir / 2016

I’m moving on to the next step, assuming you’ve found a nice place for your design sprint. Before you start your design sprint you need to buy some supplies. During a regular design sprint, I usually use A4 papers, pens, pencils, markers, post-its, zen dots, scissors, rubbers.

Here is a supplies list for your design sprint:

1 Sharpie per person
1 pad of sticky post-its per person
1 drawing pen per person
10 sheets of paper per person
1 roll of tape
1 pair of scissors
2 whiteboards per team or Large Post-it pads
1 set of colored whiteboard markers.

Now, you’re almost ready for your Design Sprint. Please don’t forget to visit my profile next week to read the “Let’s Talk About Design Sprints: Understand”

Credits: Giphy

I hope you’ll have fun while reading this series. Please share your feedback in the comment section below!

Don’t Forget To Read:

Credits: Giphy

SPRINT
100 Design Methods
Disrupt
Observing User Experience
Design Sprint

Let’s Talk About Design Sprints: Introduction was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s Talk About Design Sprints: Introduction

Cool stuff, every week

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