You may be aware of what design sprint is, or, at least, have heard about it. It’s the best way to kick-off a new project with some direction on the principal focus of the organization.
A design sprint helps teams confirm whether an idea will continue for long. It involves processes, from understanding a challenge, ideating a solution, and creating a realistic prototype, to testing to get feedback from real-world users.
In other words, a design sprint is a flexible product design framework that brings a group of people together to solve a big product problem.
Design Sprint Process
Primarily, a design sprint is made over five days that includes the following stages
- Understand – It includes defining actual problems, articulating assumptions, identifying customers, and getting all the stakeholders aligned on the same business goal with the same information.
- Ideate – It includes exploring multiple ways of solving a problem, despite feasibility. It can often produce unexplored ideas and concepts.
- Decide – It includes a structured process for making decisions on which idea to pursue and which one to leave.
- Prototype – It includes building a medium-fidelity prototype that’s enough to gather reliable data. These prototypes can be used in everything from the onboarding process, search engine result, an application layout, to solving a complex algorithm.
- Test – it includes validating/invalidating product ideas, understand users, discover design flaws, and build a product that people want to use.
Benefits of Running a Design Sprint
- Aligns team, stakeholders, and experts
Before working with the sprint, many companies work with the experts, especially for the solution part. But now they emphasize starting with a problem and framing it to let all the stakeholders work towards the same problem that needs to be solved. It can assemble a team around the cause and bring energy to help find the best solution possible.
- Great use of time and money
You can generate a massive ROI by building a solution that resonates with users. And if your idea is something that people want, you will potentially save months of development time and capital. Thus, you can dedicatedly work on other ideas. Also, testing the prototype before putting any money or time behind is essential to avoid wasting time in lengthy discussions.
- The problem feels more tangible
In-depth interviews with the people who use your product will “refine” the user, which will have an inspirational and positive impact on the team.
- A guiding piece for software development
Once you run a design sprint, you will have a workable, fluid prototype to develop against. This process is excellent to bring to your developers, as they can leave it, saving your time writing specifications and mitigating developmental risks because they have something tangible to work.
- Gives a creativity boost
Time constraint in design sprint brings out the best of your creative ideas and lets you make product decisions quickly. There’s no more dropping a decision to next week – you need to deal with it now.
- Fosters the innovative culture
A weeklong design sprint process creates momentum and generates better results. Also, it moves the process along much faster.
The product design sprint is a great tool to be included in your innovation program. It is undoubtedly going to minimize risks and improve agility when you bring a new product, service, or feature in the market.
Build better and faster with Design Sprint that delivers intricate work in a few days.
