Design Sprint

A five-day process for testing new ideas

What is it?

It is a 5 day customer-centric process for rapidly solving a key challenge, creating new products, or improving existing ones.

Design sprints enable you to:

  • Clarify the problem at hand, and identify the needs of potential users
  • Explore solutions through brainstorming and sketching exercises
  • Distil your ideas into one or two solutions that you can test
  • Prototype your solution and bring it to life
  • Test the prototype with people who would use it

The process phases include: Understand, Define, Sketch, Decide, Prototype and Validate.

Why use it?

The aim is to fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitment. It is a simple and cheap way to validate major assumptions, the Big question/s and point to the different options to explore further through delivery.

This set of practices reduces risks when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market. Design Sprints are the fastest way to find out if a product or project is worth undertaking, if a feature is worth the effort, or if your value proposition is really valid. For the latter one should also consider running a Research Sprint.

It compresses work into one week and importantly tests the design idea and provides real user feedback in rapid fashion.

How to do a Design Sprint? - A Sample Agenda

By now there are many different variations of the format. You may come across the Google variation, a GV variation, the Design Sprint 2.0 (which is the agenda shown below).

The best is to try different variations and judge which one works for what context.

Monday

  • Intro
  • How Might We
  • Map
  • Lightning Demos
  • Notes Taking
  • Crazy 8’s
  • Long Term Goals
  • Sprint Questions
  • Lightning Demos
  • Drawing Ideas
  • Start user test recruiting
  • Develop Concepts

Tuesday

  • Decide on Solution
  • Storyboard design
  • Decider Vote
  • Storyboard Final Walk-through
  • User test recruiting

Wednesday

  • Prototype creation
  • User test preparation
  • Interview room setup

Thursday

  • Testing with end-users
  • Analyse results and prepare findings

Friday

  • Showcase (demonstrate process & findings)

Research Sprint

Start At The End

Design The Box

Backcasting/Pre-mortem

News Headlines aka Cover Story

HMW

Rapid Prototyping

Prototyping

User Testing

Design of Experiments

Further Information

The GV Design Sprint with link to the book

The Google Design Sprint

The GV Research Sprint as introduced by Michael Margolis

The Enterprise Design Sprint by Designbetter.com

The Design Sprint 2.0 by Jonathan Courtney from AJ&Smart

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