Design Sprint hand-outa TOPdesk manual for Design Sprints

What is a Design Sprint?A design sprint is a five days framework that follows the different stages of design-thinking (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test). It helps development teams to answer critical business questions through rapid prototyping and user testing in a really early stage of the development process. Design sprints let your team solve challenges, reach deliverables and gain learnings, in a week.

We at TOPdesk like to use this method to spark innovation and encourage everyone in the team for user-centred thinking. We feel it helps us to align the team with a shared vision. For us, the biggest benefit is the early product validation and the involvement of our customers in a really early stage.

Monday - MapDuring the first day, the team comes together to explore the business problem from all angles. You’ll create shared knowledge and essentially unite under a shared brain.

Exercises for the first day:

Review previous Research / workLightning talks

Competitor / tech / design analysisPersona (creation, analysis)

User Journey MappingHMW (how might we)

Lightning talks

We normally start the week with some recap. Sharing insights from different perspectives about the project helps to get everyone on the same page. The UX researchers share her insights in their key findings. Or the Product Owner gives an inspiring pitch about why does he/she desperately need the sprint challenge to be solved.

We share everything we know, so we can build together on the same base!

Competitor / Design / Tech analysis

For inspiration we spend some time to look into; competing products, design solutions that solve similar problems, or possible known technological constrains.

Try to stay on the surface and use the information as inspiration. Don’t spend too much time to deep dive, instead try to stick to a broad view.

Persona (creation, analysis)

Make sure that your team knows who are they designing for! This is the most important aspect of your product: the user who will eventually use your product!

We often prepare the personas upfront for bigger projects, but you can also try to create them with a quick Persona exercise during day 1.

This exercise will humanize your users and give the development team a sense of empathy for the people they are developing for.

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Carol Wilson

PERSONA

Reservation Screens

PROJECT

13 February 2017

EXPORT DATE

CAR 26

Carol Wilson

General employee

born as a digital native

Carol uses her smartphone all day long: to stay connected with her

friends, searching restaurants nearby, but also ordering in shops or

doing online banking.

▸ solving problems with the help of the SSP

▸ booking ad-hoc reservations for meetings with collegues anywhere

▸ requesting services for herself

▸ being independent and helping herself

▸ being up to date and flexible during the day

▸ helping her collegues

▸ old fashioned software

▸ being restricted

INITIALS AGE

NAME

OCCUPATION

QUOTE

DESCRIPTION

TASKS

LIKES

DISLIKES

User Journey mapping

User journey mapping is an excellent exercise to map out the journey of the user before, during and after they engaged with the product. It documents the stakeholder experience holistically and helps to identify opportunities for ideation.

We generally map out the existing experience (packed with soft research data), which helps us to identify opportunities throughout the whole process.A map is created for every persona.

HMW

Participants of the Design Sprint are guided to make “HMW notes” during the first day. These notes represent the insights, problems, obstacles they gather from the different insights. The good thing about this method is that people are forced to reformulate their notes in a positive way, as a form of a challenge or opportunity.

HMW notes may be generated throughout the whole day, and HMW notes can be collected in a separate wall or board, called the HMW wall

[1]

Tuesday - SketchDuring the sketch phase, team members are given the time and space to brainstorm individually solutions on their own. This is the diverge stage, where any ideas are considered valuable. In this way we follow a generative approach.

Exercises for the Tuesday:

Mind mapsCrazy 8s

Dot votingStory Boards

Wireframes (Solution Sketch)

Mind maps

We generally start the diverge phase with a warm up exercise to get the creativity flow. The most important here is to keep the format free, without obligations. These drawings / or text won’t be shared with the group. The goal is to ease people into the follow up exercises, and to start gathering active thoughts about the problem and challenge.

Crazy 8s / 8-ups

Now, this is the part where the real creative ideas born! We follow a structured approach, called the 8-ups. We generate 8 ideas in 8 minutes, in an A4 paper. The goal is to generate as many ideas as possible, focusing on the biggest challenges / opportunities that we picked from the User Journey.We repeat this process more time so we can build on each other’s ideas. This is an intense but really enjoyable exercise. At the end, we hang all the ideas, like in an exhibition, on the wall.

Story Boards

As a follow-up exercise everyone chooses 1 idea as focus. In a 3 frame storyboard, we try to capture the experience / solution for the challenge. The goal is to design 1 experience / product per person.

This method is really useful if you are trying to solve a challenge where services / products are both parts of your challenge. This story telling method helps you to capture the different stages, or touchpoints you are trying to design.

Your sketches will look like comic book frames, and you will have to include the story as a guideline next to your frames.

Dot voting

We use dot voting quite often during sprinting. Voting helps us to find back our focus. Even though the second day is meant for diverging, it is super important to keep the balance between generating ideas for a particular challenge, and not try to solve everything at once!

So we dot vote to define the priority of opportunities, or if we need to choose ideas that we want to work out, etc...

Wireframes (Solution Sketch)

We try to create personal wireframes that represent personal solutions. ‘‘Wireframes are rough sketches of the flow through the screens of the product.‘‘ - (design sprint, Banfeild, Lombardo & Wax)It is really useful to draw each step on a separate paper (or sticky note), so later you could merge multiple ideas from the different flows when you create the final wireframe.

The most important to remember here is to focus on the happy path! Don’t try to overcomplicate things. The idea is to capture what each person thinks the most likely main flow will be.

Critique /silent / group

It is important to give each other feedback on the ideas. We normally do that with different exercises. Sometimes we write down our suggestions or what we dislike about ideas on sticky notes. We use a different color post-it to reflect on what we like on the other hand!

This exercises can be done without post-its, verbally. Or mix the 2! This is up to you, as the aim here is to provide constructive criticism that elevates the next round of ideas!

Wednesday - DecideNow it is time to start narrowing down your choices! In the previous step your team has generated a lot of ideas, but unfortunately, not everything can / should be built. This day we focus on converging all those ideas to come up with an effective solution. Prepare for a lot of discussions and conversations!

Exercises for the Wednesday:

Scrutinize your work!Team sketchingRitual DissentWireframing

Scrutinize your work

There are soo many ideas that you might feel overwhelmed by now. That’s why we need to tidy up and organize things a bit. We generally start day 3 with an organization exercise, to see emerging patterns or similar ideas. We try to organize the sketches around the same topic, which can be a highlighted opportunity or a step in the user journey.

This exercise helps us to see things clearer, and also to lay down the foundations of the upcoming prioritization tests.

$100 test / risk

At this stage, you might think “omg, what are we going to do with all these ideas?“ Well, we need to prioritize and make sure we pick the best combination(s)! We need to take into account perspectives from; business, technology and human. Therefore we use a combined exercise which involves a critcal look at every idea.

First, we ask everyone to highlight the weak points they can think of. We ask our peers and experts in certain areas from the organization to provide us their input. In the second round, we give the participants $100 to invest in the ideas they like to see realized.

Team Sketching

Now it’s time to start assembling the final product(s). We use a team sketching excersize, which is lead generally by designers. We try to combine the best ideas, and make them into a step by step wireframe.

Generally there will be more ideas than time to realize them. That is why the team needs to be critical to narrow down the sotryline and frame the final solution really well.

We like to split up into subgroups and tackle a specific part of the user journey(s).

Ritual Dissent

Ritual dissent is a way to criticize constructively. The goal is to find the holes in the ideas and also to share the final wireframes with each other in a way where everyone can give input before it is finalized.

Each team gets the time to explain their solution sketch, while the others take notes. In multiple rounds the teams try to build in the given feedback. This is the closing excerzise before prototyping!

Thursday - PrototypeThis is the day when the wireframes gets their final shapes in the form of prototypes. In one day we need to make sure that we build a realistic facade, that can validate our assumptions with the right users. The most important thing this day is to know when to stop.

Exercises for the Wednesday:

Make it happen!

Design the steps

Remember! Prototyping does not mean that you need to have high-fidelity beautiful Photoshop screens. The only important thing to remeber is, that your goal is to validate / invalidate your assumptions. You are going to test ideas, and not usability! The most important difference between them is that usability testing assumes that the right problem is solved with the right idea, while idea/concept testing goes one step beyond. You are going to validate whether you are solving the right problem, and whether your solution(s) to the problem is(are) the correct one.

Make it happen! (examples)

There is not much to say about this. Just make it happen within the given timeframe! Know when to cut corners, and know what are the fundamentals that you are trying to test! In these pages I collected different representation of prototypes we built in the past. We often use a software called proto.io, because it is easy to use for everyone in the team.

Make it happen! (examples)

Once we created a prototype by Powerpoint with embedded videos. That was also a great success! Again, you don’t need to be a designer to put together a basic concept representation with PPt! Just use your creativity, and focus on your hypothesises!

Friday - User testingThis is the day where you will learn probably the most! You are going to show your concepts / product ideas to its future audience. You are probably eager to validate whether this product would have a positive impact on the people’s life/work/health/.. and its relevant to your business goals at the same time. Don’t panic if you reveal that none of your product is a good fit! Think about how much time you saved from developing solutions that would otherwise end up not being used at all!

Exercises for the Friday

Prepare the sessionsConduct Interviews

Follow -up

Prepare the sessions

What are the assumptions that you are testing? Remember you are not trying to test usability, but rather focus on the bigger picture. Are you really solving the right challange? Are you solving it the right way? That should be your question!

Besides preparing the interview, you need to make sure that everything is set and ready! Get a quiet room, recorder, establish a sneak to the others (lifesize system or skype call so they can also listen in without disturbing your tests).

Remember, validating is the whole purpose of your week, make it work! But make the best out of it.

Conduct the interviews

Interview 5 customers, 1:1. Dont make the same mistake as we did multiple times.

Make sure you have 1. the most important assumptions listed you want to test2. a safe environment for your users3. good recordings & live video feed4. right amount of users invited who fit your persona profile!5. sufficient time scheduled with breaks

+1 Follow-up

OK. Your sprint is done. Officially. But what are you going to do with all the results, recordings, sketches, images, etc...

It is really important to acknowledge that “real work“ starts after your sprint. You need to analyze your results systematically, and draw your conclusions. Your results might end up as backlog items, ready to be picked up by the dev team! But it can also happen that you realize that you need another round of validation from a different aspect.

Make sure you take the time on Monday to accumulate your knowledge, and design the right follow up steps that fits your development cycles.

created by Katalin DocziTOPdesk / Customer Solutions

If you have any questions, suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact Katalin Doczi (k.doczi@topdesk.com) or Ivette van Putten (i.van.putten@topdesk.com).

credits

[1] Photo by GV Design, 2016

All unmarked photos are either by Katalin Doczi or Ivette van Putten.

Illustrations are created by Jake Knapp, and originates from the book; Knapp j.,Zeratsky J., Kowitz B. (2016) Sprint

Our process is also inspired by the book; Banfield R., Lombardo c.t., Wax t., (2015) design sprint