A design sprint is a process for validating ideas and solving problems through design, prototyping and testing ideas with targeted customers.
What it is?
It was developed by Google, as they describe it: “it’s a ‘greatest hits’ of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more — packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.” As the word sprint indicates, it’s about getting results fast, you can compress months of time into a single week. You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and get customer reactions from a realistic prototype, before making any expensive commitments.
Why run a sprint?
Developing entirely new products or game-changing features isn’t an easy task. The greatest risk is that users don’t find our solutions accessible or desirable. This is where a design sprint comes in – it’s a shortcut to learn without building and launching. Here are a few top reasons why design sprints are so popular:
Results in only 5 Days
Validation with real customers
Prototyping before building
Collaboration of various departments
In five days, the Design Sprint will help you:
Understand. Map out the problem and pick an important area to focus.
Ideate. Sketch out competing solutions on paper.
Decide. Make decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis.
Prototype. Hack together a realistic prototype.
Test. Get feedback from real live users.
On Monday, you make a map of the problem. On Tuesday, each individual sketches solutions. On Wednesday, you decide which sketches are strongest. On Thursday, you build a realistic prototype. And on Friday, you test that prototype with five target customers.
What you'll get:
Solution Validation
Product Vision
MVP Requirements
Product Prototype
User Test Results
User Journey Map
Our process
1. Problem Framing
Before we start thinking about validating solutions in a design sprint, problem framing helps us validate there’s a problem worth solving.