Design Sprint – Learn Early, Learn Often

Design Sprint is a flexible design framework that upsurges the chances of making a product that people want. It is a combination of Agile Framework and Design thinking.

It is a five-day process that uses design thinking to solve design problems quickly. It answers crucial business questions by designing, prototyping and testing ideas with end-users. Design sprint does not require building and launching any product/ project.

design matters

Pre-requisite

  • Identify the problem early
  • Limited & defined scope
  • Right & adequate talent
  • Use of user research to validate solutions

Team Composition

  • A Facilitator
  • A designer (UX/UI)
  • Product Manager(s)
  • Tech Architect(s)
  • QA Expert(s)
  • Domain Expert
  • Decision Maker

facilitator

Sprint Master

The Design Sprint is run by the Sprint Master who oversees the event.

Responsibilities of Sprint Master

  • In charge of the team.
  • Identify the design challenge.
  • Invite the right talent.
  • Take through all sprint stages.
  • Facilitate the process.

Design Sprint Planning

Step 1: Write a Sprint Brief – This is a document that contains the Sprint Challenge, Key Goals, and Deliverables which the team wish to create during the Sprint

Step 2: Collect/ Conduct User Research – Research on the existing Idea/feature /product already existing in the market.

Step 3: Assemble your Sprint team- Team of 5-7 people who can provide their inputs and reject impractical ideas in the strategic direction for the project.

Step 4: Plan the Lightning Talks. – Involve team members and leverage knowledge of external experts to bring in new perspective/ ideas

Step 5: Create a Deck- It will support as a guide for going through the sprint.

Step 6: Find the Right Space- Right space to bring out the best creativity.

Step 7: Get the Supplies Availability of stationary required by the team.

Step 8: Choose a Good Ice Breaker- To bring the focus and start creative thinking.

Step 9: Set the Stage at the beginning of the Sprint -Availability of team and schedule.

design sprint planning

Phases in Design Sprint

Design sprint phases

  • Day 1: Map/Understand:- Discover and explore the business opportunity, strategy, competition, audience, value proposition, and define criterion of success. Understand the users, their needs, context, technology capability, and competitor review.
    • 360 Lightening talks -Business goals, Technical capabilities, and challenges, Relevant user research, Existing screen, and experience.
    • User Interviews- Questions about how users use the product, Users likes, and Dislikes.
    • Field Visit where the product is used – Visit users at their workplace to get the context.
    • Stakeholder Map – List all the stakeholders, Group stakeholders in meaningful section, Decide on design and order of stakeholder, Create a team for each group to work on.
    • Competitive Overview -Review of similar projects available in the market.
    • Summary of Learnings- Share ideas, Vote for the best Idea, Nothing is final at this moment.
  • Day 2: Diverge/Sketch: – Brainstorm, develop and identify creative ways to solve the problem, regardless of feasibility and Explore all possible solutions to the problem.
    • Define the part of the problem – Focus on the same problem.
    • Take Notes – Jot down that is useful.
    • Mind Map- Map other ideas, mix them and organize them.
    • Crazy 8- Draw 8 ideas in 5 min.
    • Sketch storyboard in 10 min- Sketch complex ideas in steps.
    • Silent Critique- Share the idea on a whiteboard, review the ideas and do the voting.
    • Three min Critique- Talk about what they liked about the idea and if anything is missing.
    • Super Vote: Vote to check the majority.
  • Day 3: Converge/Decide: – Review all the ideas and decide and opt for the best options available.
    • Search for Conflicts – More than one approach in any idea.
    • Best Shots– Discuss all good ideas and decide which one to prototype.
    • Thinking Hats- Request everyone to select a perspective and discuss the decision on each one’s point of view.
    • Whiteboard User Story- This will show how the user will go through the prototype. This becomes the spec for building a prototype. Last group step.
  • Day 4: Prototype: – Design and prepare a prototype that can be tested with people. Test without investing a lot of money, resource and time. Create something quick and focus on usability, not in design.
    • Mocks
    • Demos
    • Videos
    • Physical Prototype
  • Day 5: Validate/Test:- User testing with few people from the product’s key target audience. Show the prototype outside the organization and learn what is not working.
    • User Test Users like/Dislike, Any improvement, solution meet their needs
    • Stakeholder Feedback Review and approval is crucial for the sprint to be successful
    • Technical feasibility check- Help the team prepare the scope of the work appropriately and discuss potential approaches that may work.

Five Days in desing sprint

Benefits

  • Early detection of problems.
  • User validation.
  • Fail early.
  • Design perspective to Agile.
  • Collaboration tool.

Yields of Design Sprint to QE Team

  • Effort/Cost saving: Since No Physical POC is required, substantial savings are made on QE and Dev efforts.
  • Better Testing Insights or Better Test Planning: Owing to a better understanding of Product with a clear vision.
  • A more testable product: Since QE is involved from the beginning and have a clear scope and understanding of the product, it ensures to have better test coverage and eventually having a more testable product.
  • Farther Shift left: Moving the activity of involving the QE team from the beginning ensures better Test Estimation and early detection of defects which in turn means faster and better delivery of your product with reduced costs.
  • Minimizes Testing Risk: Validating the idea first minimizes the risk to fail thereby increases the overall testing efficiency.

Where Design Sprint can be applied?

It is very flexible and thus can be used to explore almost any notion.

  • To develop the first version of a new app (product or service)
  • To build new features for existing products (UX/UI Design, any new feature, performance improvement, etc.)
  • To define any new marketing/sales strategy
  • To identify any new product/service/business ideas or new deck for a presentation to a newly acquired customer.

Where Design Sprint cannot be applied?

There are situations where it might not fit your bill.

  • NO information about the problem: When you don’t have enough information upfront to successfully inform the solution. The facilitator should know the problem, its solution, customer feedback, market competitors, technical perspective and any previous effort done in this direction.
  • NO building of effective prototype in a day: The default sprint schedule allows a day for building the prototype. For a broad range of solutions, you can build an excellent prototype in a day but sometimes it takes more than a day to get to something real enough to test.

Deliverables/Output

  • Get answers to important questions.
  • Findings/ learnings from the sprint (storyboards, notes, information architecture diagrams, etc.)
  • Prototypes.
  • User testing report with observations.
  • A plan for the way forward.

DESIGN THINKING Vs LEAN STARTUP Vs AGILE Vs DESIGN SPRINTS

 Design Thinking AND Design Sprints

Design Thinking and Design Sprint are focused on generating innovation.

Design Sprint uses tools (toolkit) from Design Thinking to get to the business solution. Both the processes are “cousins” to each other but have differences.

Design Sprint is a sequence of steps while Design Thinking is tools that help in executing those steps. Let’s think about making noodles. In this case, Design Sprint shall be the recipe and Design Thinking the ingredients to cook the recipe.

LEAN STARTUP AND Design Sprints

Lean Startup Share the goal of creating business models and a validation plan.  It’s a methodology adopted to develop a product for a market. It’s Lean because it is about developing viable projects that initially do not consume much money and that try to take benefit of each and every resource to the fullest, wasting minimal time. In a Lean startup cycle, we commence with an idea, we built it and then we launch it to the market. Only when our product reaches our customers, we can measure its performance and ascertain if our idea is good or bad

The Design Sprint puts the focus on the way we build the product that the customer’s development. Design Sprints is a quick and efficient way to minimize uncertainty and to boost development cycles in a Lean Startup environment.

lean startup

AGILE AND DESIGN SPRINTS

The Agile and Scrum methodology was created for the development teams. These methodologies are based on the planning and delivery of team tasks for development projects. Its objective is to add value, manage the project processes, avoid gaps and keep the focus on business goals.

Agile and design sprints

Conclusion 

Design sprints are for everyone.

With Design Sprint we’ll be able to provide even more value in a very short span of time. While a process is a key here and even after conducting Design Sprint you will see that you will still have lots of work to do but at least you will start with a stouter conviction on how to take your idea(s) forward. And that hopefully will be a great first step towards clarity.

So, whoever you are, go for Design Sprint as it works across domains & industries and it is a shortcut to gaining insights without having to build and launch.

References & Appendix 

Authors

Neha Goyel- Senior QA Lead

Organized and Focused Quality Engineer with over 10 years of experience in the IT industry. As a QA professional,  I have excelled in delivering software processes and products that conform to requirements, standards, and procedures. Strong knowledge and implementation experience in  Test Management Activities, Defect management and client interactions.

Dheeraj Gambhir: SDET Manager – Quality Engineering

An innovative IT professional with over 13.5 years of experience in the IT industry. Very passionate about sharing Software testing stories with a wider community. Experience in handling end to end testing projects spanning across multiple domains and technologies. A quality champion who knows how to get even the most complex things done in a simpler way.

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