SPEEDING UP DESIGN SPRINTS

The UX Design team at M&S are big fans of the Google Ventures design blog, we try to quote the contributors by name daily, and we particularly like the top tips.

Like many design teams we have created a version of their 5 day design sprint and look to use this process, or a variation of the process whenever we need to collectively address a big design challenge.

The 5 day design sprint is very compressed and intense to start with but the nature of participants diaries means we are often asked to combine multiple days into 1 or skip sections and days altogether.

Many design purists would say no to this at all costs but in our organisation, compromise is often the best way to get something done (as in most aspects of life).

It is important though to be very clear about the limitations and potential pitfalls of the process.

We recently aimed to cover 3 days in just one day…

… un-surprisingly it failed.

But we did gain a lot of understanding over our product it and proved a very useful kick off for the project.

Although we rattled through defining the problem, customer, success metrics and competitors, we still managed to generate a lot of ideas straight away.

How might we’s

If time is precious then the constrained nature of having just ten minutes to talk though these things is both liberating and efficient.

It truly stops the waffle.

Things got a bit rocky around the middle of day 2 though. As we sketched and storyboarded our two user journeys the cohesion and motivation went a little.

Crazy Eights

As we critiqued and discussed our storyboards, it was clear that we were all solving different problems. Some wanted to solve process, some wanted to solve a strategy and some wanted to solve the interface.

It was clear that we had not defined the scope of the problem that we are trying to solve well enough and importantly ‘small’ enough to solve in one sprint.

Silent critiques

Interestingly we also had the realisation that the core problem that we trying to solve was more one of content rather than feature. Without delving into personas more we could not define the content to the level of detail needed to effectively sketch out a journey to prototype.

A failure, but a productive one.