Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Chris Illuk

The Design Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers.

Design Sprints are a powerful process for orienting teams with customer problems and rapidly coming up with new solutions. The Sprint’s ability to rapidly shift organisational thinking and promote innovation have made it one of the most compelling frameworks for solving problems of existential or transformative importance to a business.

Incubated and popularised inside Google Ventures (GV), the concept of Design Sprints has now spread globally through Google’s wide alumni network, a best selling book and an active online community of sprint enthusiasts (see links at the bottom of this post).

The full GV Design Sprint process takes 5 days. Each day is focused on one “Phase” or major theme of product development. Phases are completed using “Methods”, workshop techniques that help facilitate divergent and convergent thinking about business strategy, design thinking, user research, and psychology.

To get a better idea of the type of problems explored using the Design Sprint process, it’s worth reading case studies of successful design sprints from the following companies:

Headspace explored the requirements and viability of creating a meditation and mindfulness program for children.
Classpass solved a critical user retention issue.
Mozilla reinvented the mobile web browsing experience.

Five days..?

Five days is a really long time for most companies. Getting anything out of the process also requires the relevant expertise and authority in the room to make and commit to the decisions made within the time limits of the Sprint.

Even at the most nimble startup, getting the necessary people in one room for 5 days can seem impossible. So can you get value out of the design sprint process without committing to a full five days?

The 2 hour Design Sprint

A 2 hour design sprint requires a shift in how you approach the Sprint materials.

A Design Sprint is an expensive degustation, consisting of a menu developed by top chefs. The way you approach a degustation is linear: one course after another. Definitely something reserved for special occasions.

An alternative approach to the Design Sprint materials is a shared tasting menu. Following some loose order, you pick and choose which courses suit your appetite. Like dining at a friendly neighbourhood restaurant, this way of approaching the Sprint materials is more suited to regular use than the degustation of a full Design Sprint.

Your approach should be guided largely by the problem you’re trying to solve and the level of progress you’ve made as a company towards exploring the problem. The way that you choose the applicable exercises is completely dependent on the type of problem you’re attempting to solve.

Example: 2 hour Design Sprint

Understand

HMW (15min)
Affinity Mapping + Voting (15min)

Present Insights from user interviews during HMW + Affinity mapping

Customer Journey Mapping (15min)
Success metrics (15min)

Sketch

Present comparable problem (10min)
Crazy 8’s (8min)
Sketch 8 ideas (8min)
Share & Vote (15min)
Solution sketch (20min)

Prototype

Break until next day for participants to work on prototypes individually.

Facilitator hangs all sketches on a wall

Decide

Final vote on Sketches (1min)

Validate

Test winning protoypes with customers.

TOTAL TIME GROUP TIME COMMITMENT: 2 hours

The full GV resource library on Design Sprints is a banquet sized menu of fantastic courses that without doubt are best experienced together, in the order that the chef suggests. Unfortunately, in most cases you won’t have the appetite (time or resource) to indulge fully.

The processes, exercises and activities that make up the full GV design sprint are however hugely valuable if used outside a complete Sprint. A lack of time and resources to complete the entire process in a complete state of lockdown should not put you off attempting to utilise the most useful parts of the methodology to solve your own design challenges.

Advantages of the 2 hour Design Spring

Easier to get meaningful participation

Something that the Sprint materials emphasise is the importance of decision maker buy in. The obvious difficulty when it comes to getting decision makers involved in this type of hands on problem solving is the inevitable competition for their time. Shortening the process down to manageable chunks that are easier for people to carve out in the diary improves the chances of keeping everyone you need in the room for the entire duration of your Sprint.

Solve smaller problems more often

The Sprint methodology emphasises the ground-breaking potential of Design Sprints. However, not every design problem requires complete reorientation or transformation in your approach. On the other hand, most design problems are better solved with wider participation and customer input. Getting comfortable with a condensed design sprint allows you as a designer or problem owner to apply the Sprint methodology to a wider array of problems, problems that wouldn’t justify the time required for a complete Sprint.

Disadvantages

The most time consuming and arguably most important parts of a Design Sprint are the Methods devoted to gathering customers insights and validating work done in the Sprint with customers. Accordingly the most significant potential disadvantage when it comes to condensing the Sprint process is is the lack of customer interaction.

When planning a shortened Design Sprint, it’s critical to bookend your sprint with customer input. This means presenting qualitative and/or quantitative customer research to your Sprint participants and then getting the final product of your design sprint into real customers hands as quickly as possible, while the momentum of the Sprint is still with you and the feedback has the most resonance.

Final reflections on the 2 hour Design Sprint

The Sprint methodology is a powerful driver of rapid brainstorming, development, decision making and learning. Before being dogmatic however, it’s worth considering how much more you can learn from the highly abbreviated Sprint process that you do have compared to the perfect Design Sprint that you’re never able to execute.

More useful Design Sprint resources

GV’s Sprint Process in 90 Seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2vSQPh6MCE
Design Sprint Kit — Google’s collection of resource for planning and running a design sprint.
https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com/
Sprint — How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days
http://www.thesprintbook.com/

The 2 hour Design Sprint was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The 2 hour Design Sprint

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