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Design Sprint: Is it worth the time and money?
The answer is almost always yes.
A design sprint is without a doubt, the fastest and cheapest way to validate business strategies or test product ideas with real users. It relies on a consecutive row of workshops that support co-creation and empowerment.
How many times have you heard someone from management say, "Let's be more efficient!" or "Let's innovate!" without knowing how to go about doing so? Well, a design sprint encourages a 'start doing' attitude.
Here are a few scenarios where a design sprint approach might be the most effective framework to choose:
Validating assumptions
Reducing the risk of failures
Establishing an initial process
Setting direction on a new project
Gaining speed, efficiency, and focus
Aligning your team around a product or vision
Why do a design sprint?
Design sprints will help you understand essential areas to focus on, ideate solutions, turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis, make a prototype and get feedback from real users.
I’ve run 20+ sprints at work and as a consultant. The number one thing I hear is “Wow! We got a lot done”. It’s rare that stakeholders can really focus on a specific problem/solution without distractions. Getting people into the same room for hours or days can really move the ball forward.
Inexperience teams especially love this because it gives them a step-by-step formula that brings them from a problem to a solution with real-user feedback. They get a taste of design thinking methodologies with meeting principles that focus on moving forward.
You can squeeze months of work into weeks (or less).
Here’s a statistic to back up my claim. According to IBM, design thinking research can lead to a 75% reduction in design & delivery time, often reducing an 8-month project to 3-4 months.
A few not-so-pleasant scenarios can happen if you decide to ignore the importance of design sprints.
- Taking longer to get to market
- Having an ineffective team collaboration
- Developing products with poor user experience
- Siloed teams and gaps in collaboration knowledge
- Wasting resources on features that don’t get used
- Missing opportunities to gain competitive advantage
- Unsuccessful product launches due to lack of user testing
- Making decisions without understanding user preferences and behaviors
- Investing too much time and money in ideas and products without validating user needs
This framework is part of UX Playbook. Get shortcuts to a master of UX processes, for any projects, without expensive bootcamps.
All you need to know
The amount of work that can be accomplished during a design sprint is incredible. You’ll be amazed at how productive your team can be when they have a good sprint structure to guide them.
- Consent is key
- Trust the process
- Take regular breaks
- Write names on the board
- Focus on the big 3; ask questions, jot things down and mind the clock
- Get people to commit to the sprint in advance or don’t do the sprint at all
- Know that it’s natural to be nervous but try your best to project confidence
- You don’t have to be perfect. Learn from the process and make the next sprint better
- Being a good facilitator requires a balance of patience and impatience, confidence and humility
Here are some best practices for designing your Design Sprint slides:
- Use large font sizes
- Avoid slides with a lot of text
- Include plenty of white space
- Use color to highlight key points
- Keep design elements to a minimum
- Use visual aids only when appropriate
- Include concise bullet points as instructions
- Be explicit about the timing for each exercise
- Create title pages before diving into each exercise
- Show examples of a desired output for each exercise
- Limit transitions and animations, if needed use subtle animations
Final thoughts
If you’re interested in trying out a design sprint for the first time, I recommend you do your homework by reading the Design Sprint book.
Whether for research, marketing, growth design, branding, strategy, or any other disciplines related to building a product or exploring new markets, the design sprint method is acknowledged as a viable, efficient, and cost-saving research option.
Considering that design sprints help you reduce risk, offer a more efficient process to validate ideas, remove traditional convictions and accelerate innovation, you can’t afford to try this method.
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