Design Sprint
A five-day process for testing new ideas
Mike Hepburn
Val Yonchev
What Is Design Sprint?
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 Do Design Sprint?
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 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)
Look at Design Sprint
Links we love
Check out these great links which can help you dive a little deeper into running the Design Sprint practice with your team, customers or stakeholders.