Design Sprint

I first came across the concept of Design Sprints whilst helping a UX team with their process - They were working up to 3 months ahead of the development and generally from concept to implementation had a lead time of around six months! This was currently their first opportunity to test concepts.

Design Sprints come out of Google and are used widely within Google Ventures - Their Venture Capitalist division.

Design sprints are 5 days in duration, run from 10am to 5pm.

It's really important to have the right people involved in these sessions and they must not be considered as part-time sessions where people can dip in and out of...

If you can't set aside 5 days to run the sessions - than perhaps your not ready to run one! That all said there will be some important stakeholders and decision makers who will not be able to put aside the time required.

In which case make sure that the people who really care, those who have a real vested interested those who are the big decision makers are there as follows :-

Monday - They need to set the scene and they are ultimately the ones to decide which ideas you'll going to try and test.

Wednesday -  is the decider day - Which design will be put to the test? If the 'decider' is not there on Wednesday, If they can't commit to reviewing designs and deciding - DON'T run a design sprint!

Friday - You can run Friday without.. But you really want them interviewing and seeing the results of the prototypes - Remember the output of Friday is going to decide your future product development, It's important so treat it as such.

Monday 

Set the scene, What problem are we trying to solve? What questions do we need answered? Why are we doing this? Where do we want to be in six months? What the biggest risks?

At the end of day 1 you'll want to know what question your trying to answer.

Tuesday 

This is where the team 

Wednesday - Decider day

At the start of Wednesday your room should be full of drawings and sketches...

First everyone in turns introduce their design concept, explain and answer questions.

Next people vote on which idea they like best.... There are numerous ways to do this, dot voting is my favourite, give everyone 2 or 3 dots..... Give the key stakeholders 4 or 5 dots..... Yes I know, But they are they key stakeholders!

By Wednesday lunchtime you should have narrowed the choice down to a remaining few. At which point you may decide to combine ideas or possibly to build several prototypes on Thursday and run them in parraell on Friday.

Wednesday afternoon you'll decide which design to take forward into prototyping, however - despite the temptation.... Don't jump into building it! :-) Another tip... If you decide to go with more than one prototype and you have a couple of high risk ideas consider taking one of these into Thursday. Usually due to the cost/risk high risk ideas never make it off the drawing board however Design Sprints give the opportunity to test with low risk... And sometimes the riskiest ideas are the best.  

Wednesday afternoon is spent storyboarding the solution out - Sketch out the screens designs from a user journey perspective... If you have questions of decisions to be made... Well that's why the main decision maker is there!

Thursday - 

This is where you'll build the prototype... It doesn't need to be real, It can be knocked up in powerpoint or look at some of the web tools that allow you to very easily build prototypes - Assuming you're building a IT system and not a physical product. If you are building a physical product look at adapting what you already have or make a flyer for the product.

Each session on the Friday needs to last around an hour (hopefully less) - That will include opening up the interview, setting the scene, demonstration of the prototype (15mins max) and interviewing the customer afterwards as well as writing up any notes etc. 

Friday - 

Test the prototype.... With real customers! 

This is where you get existing customers or your target potential customers and test the prototype out. 

It's important this is done 1-on-1 - No focus groups (They don't work!)

Frame the experiment before you begin... What are you looking to test? Usability? Conversions? Customer reactions? 

A few words of advice.... Don't use friends, family or even 'tame' users! You're looking for genuine results.

You need to have at have around 5 customers booked in for Friday - Any less and it's hard to reach firm conclusions... However you probably don't want too many more either. I once ran a session where we had 7 customers lined up.... And it was probably two, too many!

The output of these sessions may determine the future direction of your product and possibly several months of expensive development... Getting your design decisions right at this pays!

If Friday does end in failure - Don't think of it that way... What's actually happened is that 5 days effort has prevented you from wasting months of expensive product development that would have also failed!

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A few other tips....

1. You need a nice large room that you can use all week,
2. You'll going to need whiteboards (lots of white boards), sticky notes (post-its) sharpies, sketching paper, pens, pencils.......
3. A facilitator - Preferably somebody inderpendant and somebody who's ran design sprints before!
4. I've said it before but I'm saying it again... Everybody in the team needs to dedicate time and commit to the process.
5.