Is your project urgent? No time to put a team together for several months? With the "Design Sprint," you'll have a prototype tested by future users of your site in just 5 days! Let us introduce you to the concept and the method.
Our series on the design sprint:
- Design Sprint part 1/3: The concept of design sprint in UX design
- Design Sprint part 2/3: Understanding your users
- Design Sprint part 3/3: The art of generating ideas
Successfully designing your user experience
User experience design, also known as UX design, aims to create intuitive digital products that meet real user needs. A true acquisition tool, UX design focuses on the underlying motivations of website visitors to encourage them to interact with the content, view more pages, and ultimately convert them.
To create a successful user experience, the field of UX design offers numerous tools and methodologies. A long process characterized by the central role of the user in all decisions.
Design Sprint, a creation method based on collective intelligence
The Design Sprint is a UX design methodology of user-centered co-creation. Invented at Google Ventures and theorized by Jake Knapp, it aims to design a digital product in 5 days through a series of workshops bringing together several participants: client-side contributors, UX design experts, and a facilitator from the provider’s side.
The 5 days of the Design Sprint correspond to 5 stages of progress: understand, sketch, decide, prototype, test.
Types of projects suitable for Design Sprint
- The creation of a website, a mobile application, or software;
- The redesign of an existing digital product;
- The search for innovative solutions to a specific problem;
- The need to align the various professions that make up a team around a common vision;
- Validating a formulated issue.
Cases for which the Design Sprint is not suitable
- If your project is already very advanced or clearly defined;
- If the project requires extensive preliminary research;
- If the project needs to be released the day after tomorrow;
- If, on the contrary, the project is not developed enough and is still just an idea;
- If the team does not want to engage in a collaborative creative process.
A bit of logistics…
Prepare as much information as possible about your users
Before starting a Design Sprint, it is recommended to conduct a “user research” phase to gather as much information as possible to rely on during the workshops (interviews, statistics, experience map, personas…)
We also recommend holding a client workshop to define the main problem, frame how the Design Sprint will proceed, its challenges, expected outcomes, logistics, etc.
Assemble the team
A project team of 4 to 10 people (ideally 7) for the first 2 or 3 days, with varied backgrounds (manager, finance, technical, customer support, marketing, communications, etc.)
Among these participants, it’s important to appoint:
- A decision-maker responsible for validating choices during the Design Sprint.
- A Sprint Master, meaning a facilitator in charge of logistics and managing the Design Sprint process.
- Five testers matching your personas, for the last day dedicated to user testing.
- Ideally, an additional designer.
Create a productive environment
Should the workshops be held at your partner’s premises, yours, or via videoconference? Make sure to choose a comfortable space, quiet, well-ventilated to host the team, with available wall space and natural light to support the team’s thinking. Regarding furniture, a large whiteboard and a flipchart will do just fine.
As for equipment, nothing special is needed: wifi access, post-its, paper, markers, scissors…
The 5 Days of the Design Sprint
Day 1: Understand
The first day of the Design Sprint is essential for building team cohesion, explaining the concept, defining the objectives of the Design Sprint, and exploring user needs, while taking constraints into account.
Day 2: Sketch
This second day is about generating ideas and sketching solutions!
Day 3: Decide
This step is about making choices among the solutions created the previous day and selecting the best ones. It's also the opportunity to work on the website's future prototypes (mockups) for user testing.
Day 4: Prototype
The team of UX designers (the provider) will work on their own, building the prototypes and preparing for user tests the next day.
Day 5: Test
This final day involves testing the prototypes on 5 users to evaluate the decisions made during the Design Sprint.
Are you interested in the Design Sprint concept? Feel free to contact us to discuss it.
To finish, we'll leave you with the reference on the Design Sprint, Jake Knapp’s book!
Our series on the design sprint:
