Background
From idea to validated prototype in 5 days
A Design Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing with real customers, a process coined by Google Ventures. StrongMind was developing a new product and needed to rapidly validate a central question: how do you engage the disengaged learner?
I have never seen something go from idea to execution as quickly as I have within a design sprint.
Design Sprint · Workshop
Balsamiq · Wireframing
User Interviews · Research
Dot Voting · Prioritization
Affinity Mapping · Synthesis
Prototyping · Validation
Day 1
Framing the problem with How Might We's
The whole group, designers, developers, marketers, and leadership, wrote "How Might We" statements and affinity mapped them into categories. This collaborative framing exercise surfaced hundreds of potential questions and problems and set a shared focus for the week.
How Might We's written by the whole group and affinity mapped to categories
Day 2
User research and market inspiration
Day two focused on interviewing users, gathering data, and drawing inspiration from existing solutions in the market. We explored what we wanted students to feel, what teachers currently do, and what comparable experiences existed elsewhere.
User and market research, inspiration gathering, and initial design exploration
Day 3
Everyone designs, dot voting decides
One of the most powerful aspects of the sprint: everyone from designers to developers to managers sketched solutions. No one's ideas were off limits. Specific elements were then dot voted on, and the winning pieces were compiled into a composite direction for the prototype.
Cross-functional design solutions with dot voting to identify winning elements
Day 4
Rapid prototyping with Balsamiq
Voted elements were pulled together into an initial design and rapidly translated into a clickable prototype using Balsamiq. The goal wasn't polish; it was something real enough to test with users the following day.
Elements from dot voting taken to create an initial design, then built rapidly in Balsamiq
Day 5
Testing with real users
The final day was all observation. We ran the prototype with live users and recorded trends, both positive and negative, into an actionable list of findings. Seeing real users interact with something built in four days was both humbling and invaluable.
Observations combined into trends ranging from positive to negative net results
Learnings
What I learned
This sprint was fruitful; we discovered a large problem, rallied around it, and created an amazing array of solutions in days rather than months.
- 1Cross-functional participation produces better ideas. When developers and managers sketch alongside designers, the range of solutions is richer and buys broader buy-in.
- 2Constraints breed creativity. The five-day time box forced decisions that would otherwise drag on for weeks in a traditional process.
- 3Even a rough prototype teaches you things a whiteboard never can. Watching users navigate something tangible surfaces issues that no amount of internal debate will find.