Design Sprint (5days/8hrs)

A design sprint is a time-limited process with five phases typically spread over five full, eight-hour days. The goal of design sprints is to solve a critical design challenge by designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users.

The goal of a design sprint is to take really complex problems and get together with other people on your team, like product managers, engineers, and marketing, and try to solve that problem together. You do that over the course of a week. You do multiple design activities, from wireframing and prototyping, and then you test with users at the end of the week.

That's a really good way to get quick feedback and test those initial hypotheses. It's so important to bring people together with different perspectives. It may be that you bring in this fresh, new perspective and someone else with historical knowledge is involved in the project. But we also bring together people from product management and marketing to bring all these unique perspectives.

Design sprints typically include five phases:

Understand

The understanding phase gets your sprint off on the right foot and helps your team get a clear picture of the design challenge. Your team takes time to learn from experts and have creative discussions with many different people from other departments and industries. These conversations help you better understand the design challenge. But what's the first rule of UX design? Put the user first. This means that everything your team does during the sprint should focus on the user. So now your team understands the design challenge.

Ideate

To stimulate creativity, start this phase by brainstorming ideas and building on them to create solutions. Once you have got the team thinking, take time for each participant to sketch and present their ideas. Do not worry about your drawing skills here, the idea is what counts. In addition to all the ideas that come up in phase two, you also need to start planning for user testing, which happens in phase five of the sprint. During user testing, you'll have a diverse group of people test your product and provide feedback. To be able to do this, you need to start recruiting users that match your target profile now so that the sprint stays on schedule.

Decide

Together, your team discusses each possible solution and finally decides on the one that is most likely to excite users and increase sales.

Prototype

You are now ready to build the first version of your new app feature. At the end of this phase, you do not need a finished product, just something realistic enough to test with users. By focusing only on what the user sees on their screen, your team will create a working prototype of the new custom route feature. Way to go! At this stage, you'll also finalize preparations for user testing by confirming the test schedule, setting interview questions, and making sure your prototype is ready to go.

Test

Now it's time to put your prototype in front of users. As users test your prototype, observe how they respond and then interview them about their experience. Your team will gain important insights into changes that need to be made before rolling out the new feature

Advantages of the Design Sprint

For one, design sprints save time. With a sprint, your team can shorten the decision-making process from several months to a single week. Sprints also create an effective way to bring a product to market. Sprints prioritize the user and put their needs first. Sprints allow you to move quickly into the future to test your product and get customer reactions before making expensive decisions.

Design sprints are all about the user. Sprint participants ensure that the design challenge is always focused on the user and their needs. After all, it's the users who ultimately decide if your product is successful.

Sprints value every person in the room: from office interns to senior stakeholders, involving people from many disciplines and experience levels is an important part of the process. Why? Because considering all perspectives on the problem and solution means the best ideas will rise to the top.

Sprints give the core team time to focus exclusively on a design challenge. Think about it: Five working days dedicated solely to distraction-free, gadget-less creative collaboration.

That's a recipe for serious problem solving. Sprints also lower the risk of an unsuccessful market debut. That's because the team gets feedback from real users and can make critical adjustments before the product hits the market. Finally, sprints are versatile because they can be scheduled at any point in the project. When a challenge arises, you always have the option of a design sprint in your back pocket.

Before starting a design sprint

You need to review your design challenge and ask yourself these important questions:

Are there many potential solutions to your design challenge?

Does the design challenge require people from cross-functional teams to contribute?

Is the scope of the design challenge large enough for a sprint?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, a design sprint might be the right move