How to run a Design Sprint

TL;DR: what is a Design Sprint?

A Design Sprint is the act of turning a big problem into a prototype tested by users, in 4 consecutive days. The goal is to refine a problem statement or a major challenge into an actionable solution.

Learn more about the Design Sprint

The Design Sprint is a method that fits inside a Design Thinking approach. It covers the last 4 stages of Design Thinking (Define / Ideate / Prototype / Test). The first stage (Empathize), which corresponds to a user research effort, isn’t covered in detail by the method.

The Design Sprint was first described in the book Sprint, by Jake Knapp, in 2016. At the time, he was working at Google Ventures, Google’s venture capital arm investing in startups. He formalized the full approach, designed to turn a concept into a tested prototype in 5 days max.

The Miro template for Design Sprint 2.0

With Covid, I had to run many remote Design Sprints. To do this, I strongly recommend using Miro: this virtual whiteboard lets the group collaborate especially efficiently.

But there’s more! The Miro community has built templates. And it turns out the AJ&Smart agency formalized an excellent template that I’ve used several times and recommend! Here it is: https://miro.com/miroverse/remote-design-sprint-aj/.

4-day program

Preparation

• Logistics (rooms, materials)
• Identify who to invite
• User research
• Invite participants

Monday (day 1)

• Map
• Ask the experts and “How Might We”
• Long-term goals
• Sprint questions
• Lightning demos
• 4-step sketching

Participants: the whole group

Tuesday (day 2)

• Art museum
• Heat map vote
• Solution presentations
• Final vote
• User test flow
• Storyboard

Participants: the whole group

Wednesday (day 3)

• Prototyping the solution
• Cardboard prototype
• Or any other way to prototype in 1 day for testing the next day

Participants: sprint owner + designer (+ subject matter expert if needed)

Thursday (day 4)

• User testing sessions with 5 participants
• Story map

Participants:

• During the tests: sprint owner + interviewer (with interviewing or UX skills) + any volunteer (as a silent observer)
• After the tests: the whole group

Preparation

Logistics (room and materials)

Book a room that can host at least 7 people for 4 days (Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday or Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday).

Keeping a single room saves a lot of time:

1. There’s no need to take everything down to put it back up the next day
2. It boosts creativity because you visually remember where the items that triggered discussions are
3. It creates a sense of “habit” that strengthens team bonds

In terms of materials, plan for at least:

• 5 large yellow sticky note pads
• About ten markers in several colors that can write on a whiteboard and don’t bleed through sticky notes
• 1 whiteboard (or a second one if possible)
• About fifty A4 sheets and twenty A3 sheets
• A pack of dot stickers

Identify who to invite

A Design Sprint team is made up of 4 people minimum and 8 people maximum. At a minimum, you need:

• a facilitator
• a designer
• a decider
• a sprint owner (often a Product Owner profile)

The team must be cross-functional. The following profiles can be part of your group:

• finance profile
• Product Manager profile
• tech lead profile
• architect profile
• customer support profile
• community manager profile
• marketing / communications profile

User research

The Design Sprint method skims over the user research piece, even though I find it critical for being especially effective. So I’d suggest building an experience map of your situation using exploratory interviews to save time.

The first stage of the Design Sprint, the “How Might We” questions, will be much more relevant if they’re built on a snapshot of reality.

Also make sure to summarize the state of play with statistical data from analytics or other metrics to clear off questions you already have clear answers to.

Invite participants

Once the room is booked and the people identified, you need to find the right date. It’s critical to mobilize all participants for 2 full consecutive days (typically a Monday and a Tuesday). They also need to be available on day 4 (Thursday) from 4pm to 6pm for the debrief and to discuss next steps.

The only exception is the decider, who can be present during the following half-days: Monday morning, Tuesday morning, and Thursday late afternoon (4pm-6pm).

The following profiles must be available the full 4 days:

• facilitator
• designer
• design sprint owner

Make sure to send invitations far enough in advance (3 weeks ahead is usually a good window) while also making sure your room is booked.

A design sprint usually runs on the following schedule:

• Monday: 10am - 12:30pm, 2pm - 5pm (whole group)
• Tuesday: 10am - 12:30pm, 2pm - 5pm (whole group)
• Wednesday: 9am - 6pm
• Thursday: 9am - 6pm (whole group from 4pm to 6pm)

Also remember to follow up a week ahead and a day ahead with the whole team.

Day 1: Understand and sketch

Monday includes the following workshops:

• Ask the experts and “How Might We”
• Long-term goals
• Sprint questions
• Map
• Lightning demos
• 4-step sketching

Ask the experts and “How Might We” (40 min)

This step is about interviewing experts on your Design Sprint challenge.

While interviewing the experts, the group needs to write How Might We Questions. The idea is to reframe problems as questions.

Once that’s done, everyone sticks their notes on the wall. The facilitator then asks the group to categorize the notes by adding a category (in another color) above the columns created.

Then, each group member gets 3 votes to pick the questions that seem most relevant to address.

Long-term goals and Sprint questions (40 min)

This step is about defining the long-term goals of the Design Sprint. So you need to answer the following question:

• In 2 years, in the best case, what has happened?

Each person in the sprint has 5 minutes to write their answer on large sticky notes. What they write will be the long-term goal to reach. You’re describing the situation as it could be if everything went well: it’s a projection exercise. Only 1 answer is allowed per person. Each note should start with “In 2 years…” and they can refine their question several times before sticking it on the wall.

Once written, each person sticks their notes on the wall one by one, reading them aloud. Then everyone (except the decider) gets one vote to choose which long-term goal to address (15 min for this).

Once the votes are in, the decider defines which goal to address. They’ll be influenced by the others’ votes but they’re the one ultimately responsible for the topic.

Once that’s done, you now need to think about the following question:

• What challenge could strongly impact our ability to reach this goal?

Same drill: each person has 5 minutes to write their answers on large sticky notes. 2 to 3 answers are allowed per person. Each note should start with “Can we.” Here, you’re reframing the problems or obstacles preventing you from reaching the long-term goal as challenges.

Once written, each person has 3 votes to pick the most important questions to address. Again, the decider, who hasn’t voted before, decides which topic to address.

The map (40 min)

The goal of this step is to represent the user journey through 3 main parts:

• the goal to reach
• the actors in the journey
• the steps for each actor

The point is to make the topic to address even more concrete. Mapping the journey lets you visualize the situation to understand where the biggest problems are. This deliverable is called the “map” or “process map.”

1. Write the goal of the solution in the right-hand box.
2. Identify all the actors involved and write them in the left-hand boxes.
3. Describe the journey by drawing the steps leading to the goal and connecting them to the different actors.
4. Name the concept you’ve created and write its name at the top left.

Example map

Lightning demos (40 min)

Each person in the group aims to find 3 examples that inspire them. So everyone does their research, and for each relevant example, they write a sticky note summarizing the main idea.

After 25 minutes of research, each person QUICKLY presents their 3 ideas to the group. One person is in charge of taking notes and trying to sketch the ideas that emerge.

Important: to find examples, look in other industries.

4-step sketching (1h20)

1. Note-taking (20 min)

Everyone starts by writing the long-term goal and the sprint question(s) on their sheet.

Then the goal is to write down everything that comes to mind about the sprint: the map, ideas that pop up, important facts, etc.

2. Ideas (20 min)

The point is to make the items from the note-taking more concrete through sketching. Here, the goal isn’t at all to be pretty but to have a starting point for ideation.

3. Crazy Eights (8 min)

Each person folds their sheet in half, then in half, then in half again, and unfolds it. 8 rectangles appear thanks to the folds.

The point of this exercise is to force yourself to draw things (ideas, inspirations, or whatever) that will let you go further in the ideation phase.

The facilitator must time-box the exercise tightly, and every minute, all group members must stop drawing in the box they were working on and move to the next.

4. Solution sketch (32 min)

This is the most important step in the sketching phase. Each participant must fill in 3 A4 sheets in landscape format taped together. Don’t show your work to the others to stay anonymous and reveal it the next day.

For each sheet, on the left side, the sketch of part of your solution should appear. On the right, paste the explanation of that sketch, which should appear on a large sticky note. Finally, add a title to your work. The result should be self-contained so that the other group members can understand the ideas just by reading.

A few tips:

• We’re not trying to make it pretty, but something clean
• Words matter to explain a concept
• Focus on one main idea

Day 2: Decide and plan

Day 2 aims to build a storyboard to best guide the designers of the solution for day 3. By the end of the day, a set of designed screens will be available and ordered to make the next day’s work as easy as possible.

To stay efficient, the goal of the day is to organize discussions by first presenting the solutions, then running discussion sessions to dig into the proposed solutions.

Tuesday includes the following workshops:

• Art museum
• Heat map vote
• Solution presentations
• Final vote
• User test flow
• Storyboard

Art museum and heat map vote (20 min)

It’s Tuesday morning, the solution sketches haven’t been revealed to the rest of the group yet. The point is to put them up on the wall on arrival, with enough space between each piece. We call it an art museum because we let people wander between the different works.

Once that’s done, each person has 2 actions to do silently:

• place dot stickers
• write their questions

Each group member has access to an unlimited number of dot stickers to place on each idea that seems interesting to them. The goal is to surface the best ideas, so participants should be invited not to be stingy with stickers, even placing several on the same spot. This makes them easier to spot.

The second instruction is to write questions on sticky notes and post them under the proposed concepts.

The group has 20 minutes to do these actions.

Solution presentations (40 min)

The point of this step is to spark discussion while preventing anyone from knowing who did what.

In this step, 2 roles are essential:

• the facilitator role
• the scribe role

The facilitator presents the solutions and gets the discussion going. The scribe writes down the summary of the exchanges on sticky notes to post around the relevant solution.

Important: the group must clearly understand that the goal is not to know who did what. So no one should say they’re the author of any given solution.

One solution after the other, here’s what happens:

1. The facilitator describes the solution
2. They then ask: “Among those who voted, can you tell me why this idea seems interesting to you?”
3. The discussion starts and the scribe takes notes on sticky notes to post around the solution
4. The facilitator then answers any questions (and the scribe takes notes)
5. The facilitator asks if anyone has anything to add (and the scribe takes notes if needed)
6. The creator of the solution can reveal themselves
7. Move on to the next solution

Final vote (20 min)

Once all solutions have been presented, each person (except the decider) must pick the solution that seems most relevant to them. For 5 minutes, everyone re-reads the comments on all the solutions and writes their initials on the solution that seems most relevant to them.

Then, each person (except the decider) explains why they chose to vote for that solution.

After these explanations, the decider casts their final vote:

• they vote for the main concept that seems most relevant
• they can also add a vote on an idea that seems particularly relevant from another solution

The summary of the morning is in this video!

Creating test scenarios (20 min)

Writing test scenarios helps streamline the storyboard creation. It guides the group through the concrete steps to imagine during the user test flow. A scenario is an instruction given to users during the user test to direct their interaction.

Each person has 3 minutes to write up to 3 scenarios on sticky notes in the following format: imperative action verb + complement. The scenarios should obviously be related to the selected solution.

Example scenarios:

• Vote for your favorite t-shirt
• Pick the profile that’s most relevant to you
• Buy a gift that seems right for your aunt

Once the notes are collected, each group member (except the decider) gets 3 votes to pick the 3 scenarios that seem most relevant to them.

After the vote, the decider selects the 3 scenarios to use for the user test.

User test flow (40 min)

This step aligns the team on the screens to design according to a linear story.

Each group member writes their ideal flow individually (20 minutes for this). Based on the chosen solution and scenarios, what are the 6 steps to design for the user test? It’s important to refer back to the map and the sprint questions to answer this.

Each step must be written on a sticky note and ordered from 1 to 6. Plus, a sticky note with the participant’s name is added before the first step.

Example:

• Sticky 1: “Antoine”
• Sticky 2: “I land on a Facebook post and click on an article”
• 3: “on the article, I then click on a product photo”
• 4: “I decide to check more info on the product page”
• 5: “I go back and click buy”
• 6: “I land on my cart and validate it”
• 7: “I see a page confirming my purchase”

Once that’s done, each participant sticks their name to the wall (one below the other) and all their steps to the right of their name, in journey order, reading them out loud. Several different journeys will be proposed.

Then comes the vote. Each participant gets one vote and must pick their ideal journey.

Finally, the decider gets the final vote again:

• they pick the journey that seems most relevant
• they can pick one step from another journey that seems interesting

Storyboard (3h)

To wrap up the day, the storyboard phase will significantly speed up prototyping. The goal is to represent in pen and paper (or whiteboard marker) the entire journey to be prototyped the next day. Doing this as a group lets you go deep into the details, especially on the terms and processes to use.

This part starts by collecting all the sticky notes from the winning journey. This lets you know precisely what to sketch as a group.

Once that’s done, all that’s left is to sketch all the screens being as precise and explicit as possible, adding sticky notes to explain interactions and ordering the different screens carefully.

To recap, here’s the video summarizing the storyboard part.

Day 3: Prototype

The Design Sprint ends with a user testing phase. The last 2 days are made up of:

• a prototyping day
• a user testing day

This phase doesn’t require all of the originally present members. At a minimum you need:

• a UX profile to build the test protocol
• a designer for prototyping
• a “business” profile who can explain business rules and technical terms for prototyping
• a UX profile to run the tests
• the decider for the test conclusions

Prototyping

This day is about creating an animated prototype usable by the people invited for the test. Using a tool like Figma (a collaborative design tool) speeds up mockup production.

The goal is to create the most realistic mockups possible. No lorem ipsum. No empty page with fake content. If the imagined solution isn’t digital, do whatever it takes to make the experience as realistic as possible through various tricks. Theater is often effective for this (taking on the role of salesperson, for example).

Since the screens were created in pen and paper, mockup production goes especially fast because most of the questions have already been worked through.

Day 4: Test

Day 4 is dedicated to user tests with 5 participants and the debrief with the whole group. To learn more about testing, see the course on user testing.

Going further

• Design Thinking: the method that the Design Sprint draws from
• The sketching workshop: to dig deeper into the design phase
• User testing: to dig deeper into the validation phase