Design Sprint

Design Sprint is a user-focused design methodology used to solve design challenges quickly. It is a way to design prototypes, and test solutions with real users for a problem in five days. This methodology was developed by Jack Knapp from Google Ventures.

The Five Phases of Design Sprint

Before beginning the Design Sprint, it is crucial to select people from different cross-functional teams, to ensure everyone brings in a different area of expertise. Recruiting people for testing is also essential. There are various versions of a Design Sprint, discussed here is one of the simplified versions. The five phases of design sprint, one for each day, are as follows:

Note: The design challenge to be tackled can be pre-defined or defined in the first phase.

1. Understand: Define and/or understand the design challenge as well as business goals, user needs, and technical deliverability related to the challenge at hand.

2. Ideate: This phase focuses on creativity and imagination to generate different solutions using methods like Crazy Eights and Storyboards.

3. Decide: Select the most promising ideas for further exploration and create for them low-fidelity prototypes.

4. Prototype: Create realistic working high-fidelity prototypes for the solutions.

5. Test: Observe users interacting with the prototypes and record their feedback.

At the end of the Design Sprint, the team learns which solutions work or don’t work with their target users facilitating informed decisions.

About Design Sprint

A design sprint allows the team to quickly and efficiently conceptualize solutions to problems and validate them before integrating them into the product.

Another design methodology similar to Design Sprint is Design Thinking. The major difference between the two is that Design Sprint (as the name suggests) is used to explore solutions with speed before investing resources into development. Additionally, Design Thinking is an iterative process while Design Sprint is not.

Additional Resources

• The Sprint Book
• First Design Sprint Experience (Article)