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Foundations of UXD

Design Sprints

Understand Design Sprints:

A design sprint is a time-bound process with five phases typically spread out over five full, eight-hour days.

The goal of design sprints is to solve a critical design challenge through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users.

Design sprints generally include five phases: understand, ideate, decide, prototype, and test.

Design sprints save time. Sprints also create an effective path to bring a product to market.

Sprints prioritize the user, putting their needs front and center.

Sprints allow you to fast forward into the future to test your product and get customer reactions before making any expensive decisions.

Before launching into a design sprint, you need to review your design challenge and ask yourself these key questions:

Are there many potential solutions to your design challenge?

Does a design challenge require people from cross-functional teams to weigh in?

Is the design challenge's scope wide enough for a sprint?

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

Let's think back to those five design sprint phases we introduced earlier:

understand, ideate, decide, prototype, and test.

A traditional design sprint lasts five days, with each phase taking up to one full day.

The understand phase sets your sprint on the right track and helps your team get a clear picture of the design challenge.

Your team takes time to learn from experts and engage in creative discussions with a lot of different people from other departments and industries.

Phase two of the design sprint you start this phase by coming up with ideas and building off of them to create solutions.

Once you've got the team thinking, each participant takes time to sketch and

present their ideas. On top of all the ideating that happens 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 fit your target profile now, so the sprint stays on schedule.

Prototype phase: During this phase, you also finish prepping for user testing by confirming the test schedule, finalizing interview questions, and making sure your prototype is good to go.

As users test your prototype, you observe how they react and then interview them about their experiences.

Your team gains critical insight about changes that need to be made before you launch the new feature.

Sprint participants make sure the design challenge is always focused on the user and their needs.

Sprints value every person in the room.

Sprints give the core team time to focus solely on a design challenge

Sprints lower the risk of an unsuccessful market debut because the team gets feedback from real users and can make critical adjustments before the product launches.

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Share and engage with the Design Sprint Community⁠

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Plan Design Sprints

First up, user research. If you're lucky enough to have a dedicated researcher on your team, they can own this step.

Your research should focus on the user problems you're trying to solve during the sprint.

Next, it's time to call in the experts. If you're planning the sprint, it's up to you to schedule short talks with colleagues or industry experts.

Step 3: Find the right space. It's important to ensure that the space allows

all employees equal opportunities to perform their job: Whiteboards to capture your ideas

or hang sticky notes, acoustics so participants can hear each other easily, it's your job to make sure

everyone has what they need to participate, kind of like a teacher handing out classroom supplies.

Some essentials include markers, sticky notes.

On to Step 5: Establish the rules of the sprint. If you want this to be a gadgetless, distraction-free zone, now is the time to say so.

Step 6 is planning introductions. This can be pretty important since sprints involve

cross-functional teams that may have never met before.

Here's an idea for an icebreaker:

Ask everyone to talk about a time they called customer service to complain.

This puts the team in the shoes of a user, exactly where you want them to be when solving UX design challenges.

We made it to the final step: post-sprint planning.

Make sure you enlist a few people to help document the design sprint by taking pictures,

collecting sticky notes, and jotting down ideas.

Let's recap the sprint planning basics.

To prepare for a design sprint, you'll need to conduct user research, schedule talks with experts,

find the right space, gather supplies, establish ground rules, break the ice with your team,

and plan out post-sprint action items.

During a design sprint, the focus is on:

Understanding the design challenge

Ideating solutions

Deciding which solutions to build

Prototyping a few solutions

Testing those prototypes

Immediately following the design sprint, your team should hold a retrospective.

A retrospective is a collaborative critique of the design sprint. The goal of a retrospective is to make sure everyone who took part in the sprint has the chance to give feedback and think about opportunities for improvement.

The key questions to ask during a retrospective are:

What went well?

What can be improved?

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Week 3 Glossary⁠

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