UX Design Sprints [A Blitz Article]

We’ve all heard that businesses have to play the long game. Starting a venture is about perseverance. It’s about running the never-ending marathon, right? – Yes, and no. Before committing to an exhausting marathon, a quick sprint will do. Just how quickly are we talking about? – 5 days will do.

In this brief article, we’ll go over how you can brainstorm, define, validate and test your business idea, i.e. have a design sprint.

What are UX Design Sprints?

A design sprint is basically taking design thinking principles and applying them for 5 days. What’s design thinking? – it’s a 5-stage framework for problem-solving. We have 5 stages and 5 days, which allows us a stage per day.

These stages are as follows:

• Empathy (gathering information on the problem);
• Definition (defining the problem);
• Ideation (ideating solutions);
• Prototyping (building a solution prototype);
• Testing (testing the prototype).

Preparing for the sprint

Before we dive into specifics, a few quick and actionable tips:

• Select a problem that is solvable within the framework of a design sprint. You can’t solve world hunger in 5 days.
• Ideally, you need the whole team involved to be undisturbed. Otherwise, the flow of the sprint will be interrupted.
• You also need to make sure you have all the tools you need (digital and otherwise)
• Additionally, you should communicate to the team what the whole team sprint is and how it works. That way you can align everyone’s expectations.

The sprint itself

With the preparation out of the way, let’s talk about each stage in more detail.

Monday (Mapping the problem)

Mondays are about empathy, i.e. collecting information about the problem and the people who experience it.

During the first stage, it’s crucial that you thoroughly define a problem from the perspective of all involved team members. Additionally, you could deconstruct the problem to make it more manageable. Lastly, it also helps to map out the user journey and develop UX artifacts such as empathy maps.

For example, for a recent sprint, we started by ensuring participants knew one another and who does what within the company. Then we revised how sprints work and went over a few rules.

As the last activity within day one, we sketched out the customer journey users usually go through.

Tuesday (Sketching)

Once the problem is defined, you can brainstorm a bunch of solutions. In design thinking terminology, we’re diverging from a single problem to a multitude of potential solutions. At this stage, quantity beats quality, so it’s important not to dismiss any seemingly unviable ideas.

There are multiple workshop brainstorming techniques. The one that we like to do is “how might we” (hmw). However, stakeholders are usually not comfortable with sketching or the ideation process. That's why you need to explore different techniques, etc.

For our workshops, we also like to do lightning demos, when participants can gather inspiration from other services to better articulate their ideas of a good product or feature.

Wednesday (Choosing the best option)

On Tuesday, we diverged into a variety of solutions. On Wednesday, it’s time to converge back toward viable and feasible options.

To further flesh out the viable solutions, you can create storyboards to further boost empathy.

Additionally, dot voting is a useful technique to gauge what the team believes to be optimal solutions.

Coming back to our workshops, a step further from previous references is developing our own potential solutions. Once we had those, we conducted a dot-voting session.

Thursday (Prototyping)

Now that you have the seemingly optimal solutions, you can create an environment in which you could test them.

For digital products, the easiest way to emulate a final solution is through a prototype. Usually, prototypes are developed with tools like Figma or Prototypr. There’s a plethora of tools out there. You could also even do a prototype with some paper, clips, scissors, glue, etc.

Once the workshop participants suggested their solutions, it’s better if a designer builds a prototype, since they are familiar with the efficient tools to do that

Friday (Testing)

Once the prototype is ready, it’s time to test it with real users. Depending on how accessible your users are, you should plan for that in advance.

During the usability testing sessions, make sure you record these sessions (don’t forget to ask for consent), and do preliminary planning. The planning should help you better define success criteria (is it task completion speed, clarity, etc.).

Once you are done with sessions (usually, you need 5), you can synthesize all the insights you gathered in a report.

After the sprint

After one week elapses, you should reflect on whether the solutions you developed are viable. In practice, it's likely that you will have developed a partially viable solution. It’s less likely that you’ve completely gone in the wrong direction. Conversely, it’s also uncommon to nail the solution from the first attempt.

As such, the next step likely is to reiterate the sprint, while piggybacking off of what you’ve already learned.

Looking to learn about UX Sprints in more detail? – You can find our full and expanded version on our website here: https://adamfard.com/blog/ux-design-sprint