How to write the perfect Design brief? #DesignSprint

In case you are not familiar yet with the Design Sprint (DS), I suggest you read my “Beginner guide on Google Design Sprint.” To save you time, I include a definition of the Design Sprint at the beginning of this post or you can jump directly to section 1.

0. Recap of the Google Design Sprint

Google Design Sprint definition from Google Ventures:

“The Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers. Developed at Google Ventures, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more — packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use." (QGlue)

The six stages of a Design Sprint are:

1. Understand
2. Define
3. Diverge
4. Decide
5. Prototype
6. Validate

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

A critical part of preparing the Design Sprint is writing the Design Brief.

A design brief is a short document (one-pager) that defines the design challenger, explains the constraints, and sets a timeline for the launch of the product or deliverable.

A design brief allows you to define your design challenge and set a timeline for the launch.

1. How to decide on a Design challenge statement

You have to write the Design Challenge statement before starting the Design Sprint. The design challenge statement creates a single focus on what is the output of the design sprint.

A) The following research can help you create a challenge statement:

1. Interviewing relevant stakeholders: sponsors, designers, or developers, users.
2. Identifying the use cases for the product or solution
3. Reviewing all relevant user research.
4. Reviewing current designs of your product (in the case you are working on improving an existing product)

Usually, the first design sprint focus on the core tasks of the user and the critical user journey. Your following design sprint could focus on edge cases or secondary tasks.

2. How to formulate a great Design Challenge?

A) Scope your challenge

Scoping the challenge is the first aspect you need to consider. You have to set a specific context and analyze the users, objects, locations, and actions within this context.

For example, if you are building a product within the context of a classroom your users will be teachers and students, the objects are the supplies needed for a class such as books, board, tables, pen, the location is where the classroom is located within the school and the town. The main interactions are students participating with the teachers, talking to each other, taking notes. Within this context, you identify the main challenges or problems users have; for example, students desire more interactive classes. From this difficulty, you establish a list of opportunities for improvements and possible innovations.

Thanks to this mapping, you come up with several problems your users may face. Pick the two best problems and turn them into a Design Challenge using the How Might We (HMW) structure. For instance, “How might we increase students’ participation?” or “How might we improve class interaction?”

B) Narrow down your challenge

You have formulated a series of Design Challenge and can now question each of them until you get a challenge you are eager to solve. A common pitfall is to write a design challenge that is either too narrow to allow exploration and a variety of solutions or too big to ensure focus.

To prevent this trap, start with a design challenge that is wide enough and narrow it down multiples times until you end up with a problem you are happy to tackle.

The process to narrow it down is to look at your Design challenge and ask yourself:

• What is the impact I would like to achieve?
• What are the potential solutions?
• What is the current context?

With all this information, can I reframe my Design Challenge, so it has the perfect frame?

Diagram made from designkit.org framing steps

C) Question your challenge

At the end of the process, you can ask yourself:

1. Does my challenge admit multiples solutions (is open-ended with no right answers)?
2. Does my challenge acknowledge the context?
3. Does my challenge contains explicit and implicit human needs
4. Does my challenge have potentially a tremendous impact

If you answer yes to all four questions, then it’s likely that you wrote an excellent Design Challenge.

3. What the best design challenges have in common?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

A) An excellent Design challenge statement has ten essential characteristics:

1. Relevant: it supports the most important priority of the organization
2. Purposeful: it connects to a key result or company goal
3. Concise: it should not be more than a phrase
4. Specific: it is to the point
5. Targeted to the users: it includes a precise target audience, and it is human-focused
6. Inspiring: it is exciting and motivates people to look for a solution
7. Open: it does not impose strict limitations
8. Aligned and timely: it includes a launch time
9. Includes clear deliverables: it names the concrete items that you want to deliver at the end of the Sprint
10. Answers one of two questions:

a) What are you missing that you need critically?

b) What is the riskiest decision or hypothesis that you want to test with your users?

You can use a gap analysis to determine what the product is missing or what’s one of the riskier decisions or hypotheses that you need to test. (Source udacity)

B) Example of a challenge statement:

“How can we provide aspiring developers with the resources they need to grow and learn” (Thoughtbot)

• Deliverables: create wireframe sketches and, if the solution is proved successful, implement it in the first quarter of 2021.

C) Structure of the design challenge statement:

Create <what> <for whom> <by when> <in order to

Components

• What: the what of the deliverable
• For whom: what kind of users, a clear user with what they’ll be doing in the application or the product.
• By when: the time frame for when you need it by
• In order to: the goal you would like to achieve

D) Useful resources from The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford

• Challenge generator (d.school)
• How to frame a Design Challenge for your students (d.school)
• Design Challenge Creator 4.0(d.school)

The Stanford d.school is a place where people use design to develop their own creative potential

Congratulations if you made it this far! If you are interested to learn more about Design Sprint, you can check my other articles on the same topic. I hope you learned something new today :)

Note: This article was originally published in ProductCoalition