Over the years I have organised, facilitated and supported many design sprints, and their variants. At my last job I helped to completely redesign and rebuild the resources that we used to educated clients and the community.
What is a design sprint?
A Product Design Sprint is a technique to quickly design, prototype, and test the viability of an idea, product, or feature. The design sprint consists of 5 phases (typically days), starting with design thinking and ending with a user-tested prototype.
I have organised many, many design sprints over the years and found that there is no right way to plan one. Each problem is different and needs a slightly different approach.
Phases of a design sprint
A design sprint typically has 5 phases:
- Understand and empathise with the problem, ask questions, and start assuming.
- Diverge and exhaust your imaginations for potential solutions that meet the users’ needs.
- Converge on the best ideas, and write the test for the prototype.
- Prototype with just the right amount of fidelity to generate useful test results.
- Test the prototype and learn what’s working and what is not.
Design sprint exercises
One of the great things about design sprints is how flexible they can be. There are lots of great exercises that as a facilitator you can use to tailor the sprint to the needs of your team.
I recommend reading the book to get an idea of where to start.
Design sprint tips and resources
- I curated some advice from other designers on design sprints.
- I also wrote some tips for storyboarding during a design sprint.
- I recommend using a scorecard for the testing phase so that you can quickly gather sentiment and take notes while talking to people.
- I also like to start with a simple script document to keep handy if I get stuck on questions to ask or if I need to explain anything.