Approach
Our team of design thinkers and technology experts use remote design sprints to get to the core of the problem, leveraging the existing expertise in your business to uncover fast and innovative solutions. All from behind a Zoom call.
What's a design sprint?
Put simply, it's a framework to help swiftly solve big challenges by condensing what could be months of discovery and design work into just a few days.
It rapidly answers tough business questions through a series of collaborative workshops (run remotely by default, but especially whilst the pandemic is making in-person meetings impossible), as well as prototyping and user testing.
We've found design sprints to be an incredibly effective way to find innovative solutions whilst reducing business risk. It removes the need for endless rounds of costly iteration and instead allows us to validate solutions with users quickly in a cost effective way.
How does it work in practice?
It's all about collaboration, which is why we bring key stakeholders from your team together with ours for a mix of online workshops, usually over the course of 1–4 days. We also encourage having a key decision maker, like a senior executive or founder, present for at least some of it, which allows decisions to be made quickly and effectively.
One of the key benefits of a design sprint is how well defined it is. It’s a condensed process that boosts productivity and generates valuable insight and actions quickly. Its exact structure and timings can be tweaked to work for you and your team, but it generally happens over four days.
An example sprint breakdown
Client needed
Client optional
Day one
- Understand the challenge
- Define goals and questions
- Map the user journey
- Solution sketching
Day two
- Decide on a solution
- User test flows
- Storyboarding
Day three
- Prototyping
- User testing set-up
Day four
- Prototype testing
Solution sketching
Solution sketching can be a fun collaborative exercise that brings the best ideas to life - no artistic skills needed!
User flows and storyboarding
User flows and storyboarding help us understand the hidden complexities of the problem and find the most efficient solution.
Wireframes
Wireframes are often the final step before building a prototype and allow us to get the information hierarchy right and perfect the UI to ensure it's highly functional.
Can it work for your business?
Design sprints are perfectly suited for everything from start-ups looking to build a new concept, right through to large established businesses looking to tackle ingrained business problems.
It's especially great for:
- Moving fast to validate a new product idea.
- Pitching a fleshed out idea to executives, investors, or other team members to generate buy-in.
- Rapidly improving an existing product, which may be struggling or in need of optimising.
- Tackling big, complex problems with multiple stakeholders, and in doing so aligning multi-disciplined teams where good communication is fundamental to success.
What happens next?
At the end of the design sprint process you'll usually have a high fidelity interactive prototype that has been tested on users to generate valuable insight. Your team will also likely have a stack of other great ideas on how to improve your product further.
Depending on the outcome of user testing you may want to ask us to run further design sprints to refine the product, implement changes and generate more feedback. You may alternatively want us to hand over to your in-house development teams or contract us to build the full production version - we do that too.
Think our approach could help you, your team or business?
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