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Creating a great product is more than a great idea – it takes evidence and data only your customers can provide. Getting that early market validation can be tricky and that’s where a design sprint comes in to save the day.
You can think of a design sprint as an intense multi-day bootcamp that solves, big problems, creates new products or reinvents existing ones.
With a design sprint, you compress a month’s worth of work into a few days.
A design sprint is hands down the fastest way to prove an idea is worth building. It’s founded on lean startup methodology and takes it to a whole new level. Rather than developing an entire app, what if we designed a prototype instead?
Now you accelerate your growth by learning from real customers in a fraction of the time. Answer your most valuable questions, remove assumptions and biases, and validate your model in record time.
Don’t invest months of time, invest a week.
The best way to think of a design sprint is like an intense multi-day bootcamp. Similar to how bootcamps are run, each day is structured for maximum effectiveness and to produce the best results possible by the end of the week.
I work with you to define the challenge we’re trying to solve and get crystal clear on the target market you serve. We’ll spend the first half of the day discussing the overall project. This is a crucial step to make sure we are both aligned on the long term goal of the application.
The second half of the day will be brainstorming possible solutions. There are a number of exercises we can run through to ensure we view the customer’s problem from different perspectives.
The first day can be exhausting, but it’s also a ton of fun because we get to dream big, imagine what could be, and really dive into creative solutions to test later in the week.
While the first day in our design sprint gets our creative juices pumping. day two will force us to get focused choose what we want to be building and testing in the next few days.
The morning is spent discussing our solutions from the previous day. We’ll debate these potential prototype options, weigh in how we think customers will react to each, and ultimately choose the solution we think has the best chance of success.
After a break for lunch we’ll start mapping our the scenes of our prototype. This is called story boarding and it’s kind of like writing scenes for a movie. From start to finish each step in the customer’s journey is sketched. A customer’s journey is crucial to success so we’ll be spending the rest of the afternoon perfecting the prototype design in preparation for tomorrow.
By this point in our week, we’ve already hammered out a ton of design choices for the prototype. On Day 1 (Map) we broke down the core challenge the app will solve, and in Day 2 (Decide) we took the challenge and envisioned the prototype from the perspective of our ideal customer.
Now it’s my job to take our notes and focus on building a prototype for the day. Now clearly one day is not enough time to build an entire app so I’ll be using a lot of tricks up my sleeve to “fake it”. A realistic facade is all we need to test with customers tomorrow and that’s all I’ll be building.
The end result will look and feel just like a real app. Our test users will not be able to tell a difference and that’s important to keep them focused and immersed in the user experience.
Finally, I’ll be in touch throughout the day for questions and to keep you in the loop. However, you don’t need to be staring at your email your email constantly. This day tends to go by without a hitch because we’ve spent our previous work together completely aligned in a shared goal for your business.
The final day has arrived and it’s time to put our prototype to the test. I’ll be spending all day interviewing our target users that we’re scheduled earlier in the week. Each interview is recorded with a camera on the person being interviewed and a camera on the prototype. These two video feeds gives us a tremendous amount of insight during the interview including struggles with the prototype, touch or click interactions, and body language from the user.
Once all my interviews I’ll package up the results, prototype, and interview videos. When I’m done adding my notes and findings we can schedule a call to go over the report and discuss your next steps for the app.