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Generally, when you hear the word sprint, you think of a race or marathon. That’s not the case here, but the speed is the same. A design sprint is a fast-paced exercise in design thinking, which is the five-step process for developing and testing an idea.
Source: Innovation Training
Step One: Empathize
The first step in this process is to establish a connection with the audience to who the solution will benefit. Creating a human connection is important to understand the psychology behind the solution, and to truly learn how your audience behaves and thinks.
Step Two: Define
Here is where you would define the problem, based on conversations and interviews that you conducted. What is most challenging for them? A common way to view this is to present the problem in a “How might we” format. For example, how might we make our app more user-friendly?
Step Three: Ideate
This is where you let your mind run wild and develop as many ideas as possible. Whether they hit the problem right on the head or are barely related, record all of it. This can be done alone, with a partner, or in small groups. You can use a large sheet of paper, post-its, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Step Four: Prototype
Prototypes are a rough design of one of the ideas you’ve chosen from the Ideate stage. The design can be physically made from materials you have lying around, or it can be created digitally. The goal is to create just enough of something so that your user/audience can understand the solution, but not so much effort in case the user/audience doesn’t like the prototype.
Step Five: Test
The last, and probably most exciting step, is to test your prototype. Your user/audience will give you feedback on whether your solution is headed in the right direction, or if you need to think of something different.
Typically the design sprint is done in a five-day period (one step per day), but in the design sprint I participated in, I had two hours. Partnering up with a classmate, we had 120 minutes to determine how we could help each other in terms of our experience here in the graduate program.
At first, I was excited to get started and try to get to the crux of a problem. I quickly realized, however, that this was much more difficult than I anticipated. I think it was mostly due to the fact that the challenges were abstract and intangible. I was also struggling to come up with the right questions to ask to narrow down a problem. I don’t do well when I’m under the gun, so this exercise was stressful for me. I probably would have done better with the way a design sprint is normally structured (one step per day), or if the solution included something more tangible.
You can take a look at my process here.
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