Neat Notes - A Design Sprint Hack

I've had a design lead walk into a sprint once and say "OMG, those notes are fantastic, I wanna start making something out of them right now!"

I knew, I was onto something.

On day 1 during the Lightning Talks/Expert Interviews your design sprint team members are asked to write down HMWs (How Might We's). So who is gonna capture all the facts and data that your experts are giving you? You are, of course, silly!

In the book the facilitator might update the white board (map, sprint questions) with new information from the expert interviews, in my experience, that is not quite enough.

While your team members concentrate on the opportunities they could be solving, you need to capture all the info they will need for solving. The Neat Notes will be a tremendous help during the 4-Step-Sketch as well as Prototyping.

Here's a story.

We did a design sprint for a user journey for a telco, in which we wanted to enable customers to choose their plan first and then the phone. If you have ever purchased a plan for your mobile, which everyone has, you know those little buggers are darn complicated. So how where we supposed to make them easy to understand for the customer, if we didn't even understand them fully.

We had a pricing manager with us as an expert and were able to ask him all the questions.

The team members wrote down the opportunities they saw and I captured all the facts like pricing, minutes, data. There are different amounts of minutes and data, different roaming options and different tiers that change the phone price that you purchase with your plan. Because of all the different combinations there was quite the variety.

I managed to capture them and we used that information to create a rule engine, a prototype and the copy for it.

Capturing all the stuff is only half of it though. You have to be able to re-use those notes and that's why they have to be neat. I wish I could show you a picture of that or any other design sprint, you'd immediately see what I mean.

Let me describe it for you:

• Easy to read: Clean, evenly spaced, big enough hand writing
• Only the essentials: Not too much information, so it does not get overwhelming
• Structured: Different sections on the whiteboard, bullet points, arrows
• Visuals: Add icons as visual cues to find information easily

This will help your team members to a) completely focus on the HMWs, their primary job without worrying about forgetting important details and b) make sure they base the ideas, sketches and the prototype on correct information.

Personally, I have always liked taking neat notes. It helped me to study in school and later in university, I can understand the most complex things if I can rearrange the information into my own notes. Making this work for others takes a bit of practice, but I promise you, it is worth it!

I am curious if you've had similar experiences? Are you gonna try this? Let me know in the comments!