Design sprint day 1
To kick off the week, we really just want to understand the problem so we can brainstorm solutions. We start the Google product design sprint by asking as many questions as we can. We end the day with an enormous amount of observations and notes about the users, the business context and our hypotheses. If we've done our job well, we identify what signals will tell us if the product has been successful or not. That's key. We're almost setting ourselves up to write the interview guide for day five’s usability tests on day one.
At TXI, we’ve been using a process called an Inception to understand our clients’ business needs for years. The structure is very similar to day one of a design sprint — both are day-long sessions full of questions and fact-finding exercises. We’ve adapted Google’s template to incorporate some of the activities we do in an Inception. Things like “proto-personas,” rough sketches of users and their needs, and “hopes and fears,” a risk analysis exercise, are additions to the traditional design sprint, and ones we find highly valuable.
Everything we do is geared toward answering the same three questions — what are we doing, why are we doing it and who are we doing it for? We break the day up into four or five different exercises, so we can keep people engaged and make sure no one’s going unproductively down a single path. At the end of the day, we have a journey map that charts the steps users will have to take to complete the action the client wants. Then we highlight the pieces of the journey we're going to design prototypes for, which becomes a kind of checklist for the week.
Design sprint day 2
Day two we call diverge, because the team breaks up into separate corners to sketch out product ideas. It's based on the notion that the best way to get at different ideas is to have people individually focus on creating solutions. The moment you put two people in a room together there's a lot of synergy that starts to happen, and their ideas end up merging into one. It’s great — just not when you're trying to get a lot of ideas in a short period of time.
We start the day with a competitive analysis. Along the idea of diverging, we don't just look at true one-on-one competitors, we look at analogous examples too. Companies in the same industry often gravitate around similar ideas. When you look just outside of that sphere though, you can usually find a business that's fundamentally solving a similar problem in a different way. That’s where you can find some interesting ideas.
Before we start sketching, we share inspiration with a series of lightning demos, where each person takes three minutes to walk through three ideas they have. To get folks who aren’t used to sketching up to speed, we use an exercise called Crazy Eights, an extremely time-constrained sketching window designed to get people into a flow. Then we do pencil and paper concept sketches for the rest of the day.
Design sprint day 3
The third day gets really interesting, because we have to decide what path we’re going to take. This is the day we absolutely need to have client participation, especially from the designated decider.
We start with dot voting, where we place dots next to the parts of sketches we think are working well. It highlights the ideas that are ready for testing in a very visual way. GV does its sprints almost entirely with other designers, but because we often work with clients who don’t have a background in design, we added a step for people to explain their ideas. That way we get people’s pure reactions in the heatmap voting, but we make sure everyone understands the intention of the design before picking a final idea to prototype.
To pick the main concept we’re going to prototype, we use big-dot voting, where each person gets one vote. This is where we may call in the decider if things are close. Once we know where we’re going, we spend the rest of the day storyboarding. That gives us an opportunity to incorporate the pieces that worked from the designs we didn’t choose into the one we did. It also gets everyone on the same page about exactly what they’re prototyping.
Design sprint day 4
This is when we divide and conquer. The prototyping piece is straightforward. We split the prototype into pieces so we can build a testable model in one day. Then we have one person who’s assigned to be the stitcher, who puts the pieces together and matches the styles and flows to make a finished product.
While our designers are building, we assign our clients the job of gathering real content, so we can make sure the prototype is as realistic as possible. It also keeps them in the room for when we need to make last-minute decisions.
Design sprint day 5
Day five is when we validate. The whole week leads to this point — having the deadline of users testing your product really helps you focus the first four days, because you need to make sure there’s something there for them to see. We ask our client to find five people who are representative of the product’s target users. Then we get the prototype in front of each user individually so we can see how they interact with it and ask them questions about the experience. We deviate from Google’s sprint process and use a rainbow spreadsheet to quickly collect and visualize the responses. At the end, we synthesize the findings so our clients can share them internally, one last departure from the traditional product design sprint model.
We walk away knowing whether the idea shows promise. To get that answer within a week is key. Being able to quickly validate or invalidate a prototype allows us to throw away an idea without a lot of investment. Or, better yet, to continue down a path with a clear idea of what’s already working.
What takeaways you get out of a design sprint
Clients are generally blown away by what they’re able to walk away with. At the end of a design sprint, they get a working prototype that they own. They can use the prototype to sell the idea internally or to test it on more users. They can even take it to another company to build the finished product, though we’re always happy when they want to continue with TXI. Clients also walk away with feedback from real users. They have the taped interviews, as well as our report on the findings.
Being able to see what people really think of the work right away is so powerful. It’s rewarding for us as designers, but it’s incredibly useful for clients. Instead of thinking about how a fictional user might respond, you get to see the reaction of a real user. When it goes right, it’s affirming. When it doesn’t, it can make you squirm. But it’s always educational, and it always leads to better products.
Right now we’re working with Rice University and Fiore Nursery and Landscape Supply to build the ideas that came out of the product design sprint process. We’re able to build much faster, because we already have a prototype and a working relationship with the client’s team. It’s the user feedback that gives the real value though. We don’t have to wonder whether users want what we’re building — we already know.
So if you have an idea that’s been nagging you, let’s work on finding an answer. Contact us to get started or attend an event.
