Design Sprint Workshops

Session 1 - Align, Decide and Research

Introduction

Duration: 15 mins

The very beginning of the workshop is the most important part to set the correct tone and vibe. Here's an ideal to-do list to kick off the Hypersprint workshop with:

Welcome everyone and thank them for turning up.
Share the Miro link, introduce how it works, and let everyone find their personal workspace.
Normally, it's okay to skip personal introductions. Quickly introduce the Deep Work team, emphasising their strengths.
Talk about what's going to happen over the duration of all days. Go into a bit more detail on what's going to happen on the current day.
Explain the concept of breaks. Emphasise that breaks should be used to rest. (mention time boxing)
Explain how the collaborative process works and the importance of everyone's involvement. (repeat this point at the beginning of each session)
Help to eliminate the fear of saying something irrelevant or stupid. Any input can spark ideas.
Empower others on the team to feel their input is valuable.
Mention that it might be intense at times, but that's ok. Just trust the process.
Nominate a decider. The decider is the one who pushes the envelope forward wherever the team is stuck somewhere and couldn't come to a decision.
If applicable, review the styleboards created in the previous workshop and allow the client to vote on their favorite board. (5 minutes and 1 votes each) Then allow for a short 5 minute discussion.

How Might We

Duration: 48 mins

How Might We (HMW) is an exercise wherein everyone comes up with questions to tackle a challenge or to solve a particular problem. Ask the decider to talk about the biggest challenges and let everyone jot down the How-Might-We's (HMWs). Let everyone contribute who has expert knowledge. This discussion should not take longer than 30 minutes.

Here are some questions to ask during the exercise:

What can be done with the tech?
Who is the target audience specifically?
Who is currently using it?
What’s the most important thing for your target audience?
What are the most difficult challenges?

Make sure everyone is actually writing.

Progress and guide everyone through the HMW related exercises:

Quickly arrange the HMWs into categories. Overlap doubles. This should take 10 minutes.
Vote on the most relevant HMWs. Each participant gets 4 votes whereas the decider gets 5. This should take 7 minutes.
Arrange voted notes into a "tree" structure in order to prioritise the ones with a higher number of votes. Read out the final results. This should take 1 minute.

Long Term Goal

Duration: 18 mins

In this exercise, make everyone discuss the long term goals of the project in an optimistic sense. This is a beneficial exercise that would be helpful in future sessions when there are confusion and disagreements amongst the team members. This way the team can always come back and refer to these goals.

Let everyone write 1 note, starting with "In two years time...", outlining the future vision of the project. This should take 5 minutes.
Vote on the most succinct long term goal. Each participant gets 1 vote whereas the decider gets 2. This should take 3 minutes.
Combine winning goals into a full sentence. Try to be succinct and let everyone's opinion count. This should take 10 minutes.

More about Long Term Goals here:

pageLong Term Goal

Sprint Questions

Duration 28 mins

In this exercise, make everyone come up with questions and doubts in a pessimistic sense. Discuss the problems, challenges, and list out the things that could go wrong. This would be helpful while figuring out the answers to these questions in the designing and prototyping stage.

Let everyone write 3 notes, describing potential challenges while reaching the long-term goals. The questions should start with "Can we..." and be specifically aimed at anything the team has influence on. Do your best to avoid questions that are outside of the teams reach, e.g. technical or legal constraints. This should take 5 minutes.
Vote on the most relevant questions. Each participant gets 2 votes whereas the decider gets 3. This should take 3 minutes.
Select 3 questions (combine if necessary) and rephrase them into "Can we..." questions. This should take 10 minutes.
Select the most important question and highlight it. Ask the team, "if it was possible to only work on one question, which would it be?" This should take 10 minutes.

User Journey Map — Discuss, Vote, and Combine

Duration: 25 mins

The goal of this exercise is to create an overview of an ideal user journey.

Following are the steps to achieve the same:

Make everyone write a basic user journey. If possible, try to condense the user journey into 6 steps (one user step per post-it). Starting from something like the first contact with the product and ending with the desired activity. If the product already exists, write out the existing primary user journey. If it doesn't exist, write a basic hypothetical user journey. This should take 10 minutes.
Read through and vote. Each participant gets 2 votes. Let the participants vote on an individual user journey (row) and an individual user step (column). On the other hand, the decider gets 3 votes and can vote on one row and two columns or vice versa. This should take 5 minutes.
Combine the top-voted journey with additionally voted steps into one. This should take 10 minutes.

User Journey Map — Elaborate

Duration: 30 mins

Transfer the combined journey onto the user journey map frame and ask everyone to elaborate the user journey using keywords and exploring possible details and side journeys. This should take 30 minutes.

Stick with the time. It's okay if the map feels incomplete and not perfect.

User Journey Map — Highlight Focus Area

Move the upvoted HMWs into the relevant areas. Circle the areas with clustered HMWs to see what to focus on. This should take 10 minutes and will help you to not overpromise.

Stick with the time. It's okay if the map feels incomplete and not perfect.

User Journey Map — Highlight Focus Area

Move the upvoted HMWs into the relevant areas. Circle the areas with clustered HMWs to see what to focus on. This should take 10 minutes and will help you to not overpromise.

Stick with the time. It's okay if the map feels incomplete and not perfect.

Facilitate Research

Duration: 30 mins

In this exercise, we will make a mood board by browsing through and collecting inspirations from the web.

Make everyone browse the web to search out for products or services that faced similar challenges and found elegant solutions. They can be from completely different industries but should have relevant solutions.
Ask everyone to take screenshots or copy the things they found interesting and place them on the Research section of the Miro board.
Give everyone 1-3 minutes to go through their examples and explain why they are interesting. During the presentation, allow members to use dots to vote on the ideas they resonate with. There is no limit on the votes.
For those who can not participate, ask them to record a screen share video.

Refer to the Long Term Goal and Sprint Questions to get the most out of this exercise.

Visual Design Focus

This exercise should only be introduced if the client scheduled a visual / UX iteration with Deep Work. Please double-check with the creative director before the project starts.

If there is no iteration feel free to simply ask the client if they would like a dark or light interface. More extensive visual focus needs to be scheduled and charged for separately.

This exercise is only for the client team. Ask them to place a single vote per row on any of the adjectives. If some of them are unclear or seem ambiguous, it's completely normal since this exercise is more to stimulate a conversation than settle on anything specific. Involve the product designer in the conversation to make sure the requests are possible in the tight time frame for prototyping.

Session 2 - Create Solutions & Vote

Draw Concept

Draw your own concept to provide the client with suggestions. You can take inspiration from this page:

pageCreating a compelling concept

Concept — Note-taking

Duration: 30 mins

Let everyone go through all the research from the previous step and take notes. Make them feel free to make some initial sketches of what the interface or product could look like. Do not let anyone share their notes with others yet.

Do refer to the Long Term Goal and Sprint Questions whenever anyone feels stuck.

Concept — Crazy 8's

Duration: 10 mins

Crazy 8's is a quick exercise to draw some rough sketches of the product. Make everyone take a sheet of paper and fold it three times to get a grid with 8 cells. Ask them to sketch one major part of the interface into each cell, per minute. Don't worry if they're not finished, just ask them to iterate 8 times on the same idea.

Concept — Integrate

Duration: 60 mins

Let everyone collect all the things from the previous steps into a full three-slide concept. Remember to make everything self-explanatory and annotate with sticky notes if necessary. Take photos of the concepts and upload them to the board. Cover them with the cover sheet to keep people from peeking.

Take a break!

Duration: 30 mins

Congratulations! You are done with sketching the concept. It's time for a break.

Heatmap Voting

Duration: 10 mins

Make everyone vote on details they found fascinating. Votes can be unlimited. Place as many votes as you all can to create a heatmap.

Straw Poll — Voting

Duration: 7 mins

Make everyone, except the decider, think about which concept provides the best structure for the storyboard. This should take 5 minutes.

Each participant gets 1 supervote whereas the decider gets none. Make each participant write their initials on their supervote in order to distinguish their supervotes from the rest. Everyone simultaneously places their supervote on whatever concept (or part of concept) is best. This should take 2 minutes.

A vote is represented by a red dot 🔴 whereas a supervote is represented by a green dot 🟢.

Straw Poll — Present

Duration: 3 mins each

Let each participant explain their decision to the decider. Make sure the decider is listening to these presentations very carefully.

Decider Votes

Duration: 3 mins

Ask the decider to place 2 supervotes on the concept to move on with.

Facilitate second user journey

Duration: 42 mins

Considering the final results we got from voting in the previous exercises, let everyone form a refined user journey.

Please make sure you are mindful of the product designer's tight schedule and focus only on the most important screens of the user flow, even if it means that other flows will be deprioritized and won't make it part of this scope. In case the team wants to include additional, out-of-scope screens explain that doing so will come at a compromise of the LTG and Sprint Questions and we highly recommend to design the main user flow first. If additional screens are still required, they can be added to the scope and final invoice.

Make everyone write a user journey based on the winning concept. Starting from something like the first contact with the product and ending with the desired activity. This should take 7 minutes.
Read through and vote. Each participant gets 2 votes. Let the participants vote on an individual user journey (row) and an individual user step (column). On the other hand, the decider gets 3 votes and can vote on one row and two columns or vice versa. This should take 5 minutes.
Combine the top-voted journey with additionally-voted steps into one. This should take 30 minutes.
Define the user - this should take 5 minutes in discussion and 10 minutes if more input and voting is required.

Make sure you share the result of Define the User with the user tester scout.

Session 3 - Merge Solutions

Storyboard — Place user story map

Duration: 10 mins

Make everyone place the User Journey Map post-its decided on in the previous session above the empty frames of the storyboard.

Storyboard — Outline

Duration: 50 mins

Make everyone collaboratively create an outline for the content. Use already created sketches to create visual references in each frame.

Storyboard — Details

Duration: 50 mins

Make everyone fill in more detailed text and imagery. In a way, design a rough skeleton of what the actual product would look like. Delegate larger text chunks or content to a few team members and experts so that the rest of the team members can work on storyboarding.

If the content or copy gets large, make sure you prioritise what is to be tested and get agreement from the team. This makes sure the user testing gets the most important answers.

Referring to the long term goal, sprint questions, and mood board would always help.

Storyboard — Polish

Duration: 50 mins

Make everyone work on the final touch-ups of the storyboard and see if there's anything left to be worked upon.

Customer Segment and Sign off

Duration: 10-15 mins

Before parting ways you need to briefly discuss two things:

What's the customer segment / target audience for this product? Make sure the team is aligned on the specifics (pre-existing knowledge of the users) so the responsible on the team can find the right people for interviews.
Ask if there is anyone in particular who should be in the tests (e.g. a key stakeholder or friend)? So their opinions become part of the data set. - The context of this is to make sure they client does not show the prototype to any single person or group and interrupt their opinions as important against a qualitative analyses with several users in the user testing process.
The decider needs to sign off the wireframes and agree that everything will be designed exactly as in the storyboard. If this doesn't happen, the prototyping phase can not begin.

Record summary video for the researcher

Record a quick screen share for the team by going over the HMWs, Long Term Goal, Sprint Questions and decisions made during the Storyboard phase. Mention everything you picked up on as being important to the client team, even if it was not part of the notes on the board.

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Last updated 1 year ago