Few things help to solve a potential problem at hand more than a Design Sprint. What’s a Design Sprint you may ask? Well a Design Sprint is a term coined by Google Ventures for a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.

Over the course of 5 days we:

  1. Framed our problem and potential pitfalls that we would face and came up with hundreds of questions and problems that would accompany our product.
  2. Interviewed users and gathered data.
  3. Designed different interfaces to solve the problem at hand.
  4. Then made a prototype based off the winning design.
  5. And finally tested with live users.

The speed and rapidness of creating and validating solutions within the sprint is an amazing and invaluable tool that should be available to anyone and everyone who needs to solve problems fast.

Below you’ll find some images and information about the sprint that we completed to help us find a solution to a new product that Strongmind was trying to develop that faced the main question of – “How do you engage the disengaged learner?”

Day 1: “How Might We’s” written by the whole group and then affinity mapped to certain categories.
Day 2: User and market research / inspiration / begin designs.
Day 3: Design solutions. Everyone from designers to developers to managers came up with these designs and then specific elements were dot voted on and those elements were compiled into a prototype.
Day 4: Elements from the dot voting taken to create a initial design for a prototype and then creating the prototype rapidly through Balsamiq.
Day 5: Observations taken from user research on the final day and combined into a list of trends that ranged from positive and negative net results.

Ultimately this design sprint was very fruitful. We discovered a large problem and rallied to create an amazing array of solutions. I have never seen something go from idea to execution as quickly as I have within a design sprint. I am hopeful that the things we learned are used in our product going into the future and that the company will continue to run these to solve and iterate quickly and rapidly when a large question comes up.