Design Sprint Journey.

Hi I am a 23 year old Design Student and am documenting my experience with completing a design sprint. Design sprints help streamline the design process and generate as many ideas as possible in quick timeframe. These sprints are broken up into days, with each one relating to a specific are of the design process, the original sprint is 5 days though the one we have done is 4 days.

Day One:

The first day on a design Sprint is to map and sketch. Here we ask ourselves the questions based on our brief, what are the goals? And how can they fail? We break down the brief to find what exactly it is asking, what our end goal is. In my brief my goal was to match students with roommates that they were compatible with, that was what I needed to accomplish. Looking at this I then had to find out how they could fail, this allows me to see what can hinder my goal and find problems that I need to solve with my design. There are more questions we have to ask in this stage, these are the Sprint Questions and the How Might We’s. These are the question we will have to answer in our app and the HMW’s are a reflection of this.

All these questions help us make the design map as we now understand the problems and the steps we would need to obtain our goal. Here is the map I created with my brief of creating a roommate app.

The second aspect of day one is sketching. Here is where we start ideating and sketching solutions to the problems, we found in the mapping sage.

Day Two:

The second day is for deciding and storyboard. All the sketches from the previous step are brought together and when in a group, you vote on the solutions you like best. As an individual I looked at all my ideas and decided which one I thought best solved my issues.

From this point I created sticky notes that represented the 6 steps of my users test flow. With this as a guide I can create the storyboard for my prototype.

Day three:

Prototyping, The 3rd day of the design sprint is reserved for prototyping. This is where we take out storyboards and turn them into a working but rough prototype. For my prototype I used Figma to create it, using the colour pallet from the brief and my storyboard from the previous step, also created on Figma. Here I could see if there was anything from my storyboard that didn’t work and was able to make tweaks to make the app prototype a smooth experience as possible. Here is a screen shot of my prototype as a whole.

Day four:

The last day of the design sprint is testing. Here you have people, preferably your target audience go through the prototype while taking notes on any friction or issues they have while navigating the app. From here we can see the practical application of the design, something we think is obvious since we have been staring at the design for hours might not be obvious to its users. I took in what my testers suggested and looked back at my design o see where it could been improved upon, giving myself a better handle on the design process and encouraging myself to do better in future projects.

This design process really helps give structure to a large project and makes it easy to break down and understand. It makes cultivating ideas easy and helps you stay true to what you are trying to accomplish.