Episode 14 – The Design Sprint

What is it? How does it work? And more importantly – how does it benefit you?

We’re in a world that’s moving pretty fast. It almost seems like technology is changing on a daily basis. Which is why there seems to be a genuine need for companies to move their products to market faster than ever before.

When designing and developing a new idea, I can’t stress how valuable a design sprint can be. Steve Jobs once said: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of the times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

And in the design sprint within a matter of days, you go from an idea all the way through to a prototype that looks just like the real thing and able to test it with real people. We use design sprints all the time with clients and internally on a regular basis to help test big ideas as fast as possible.

There are a few different ways you can run a design sprint which, depending on the challenge or the stage you’re at, can typically take about one to four days.

So what does the design spring consist of?

The first part of the sprint focuses on getting the entire team to draw out all the challenges and then be able to put them into a prioritised order. You then align the team on what you need to focus on.

Day two – the focus is on pulling together as many solutions that you can think of. It’s much more quantity over quality at this point. And then as a democratised group, you can then agree on the best solutions to move forward with. You then build out storyboards of how the MVP or the prototype will look.

Day three is all about designing the screens, creating optimal user experiences and developing the prototype.

And the final part is day four. It’s full-on testing to gather actionable results.

Now, design sprints can appear overwhelming but considering that they radically reduce risk, reduce time to market and accelerate innovation, I firmly believe you can’t afford not to do it.