Beginner’s Guide to Design Sprints
Sometimes ideas simply aren’t profitable, but you won’t know that until they are built up to see if the product is good or bad. While you could invest all the time and money into fully building a new software, you could use the Design Sprint method to rapidly finish the program. below in this article, we will cover the Beginner’s Guide to Design Sprints.
What is a Design Sprint?
Normally the design process of building a program has four parts: ideate, build, launch and learn. These four parts are essential to fully completing the product, but what if you just want to test the idea to see if it’s viable? Google Ventures, or GV, created the Design Sprint method.
This takes only the first and last segment of the design process, or the ideate and learn parts. This ensures that the product can be built in a week instead of a month. There are very specific ways to create Sprints and GV believes that the method should not be altered in order to achieve the best results.
Using this, a business can see if more money should be placed into the project, or if the idea is doomed to fail and another idea should be used instead. According to Adobe, “Design Sprints are very prescriptive, it’s almost like a cookbook that tells you what you should do and in what order.”
Why a Design Sprint is Important
Everyone has seen a product, service, program or whole business that was dead on arrival. It might be sad, but not every idea is a good one. Normally it would take a whole month to see if the idea could be fleshed out and created into a viable product. Not only that, but most businesses would go ahead anyway because they already invested so much time and money into making the product.
The Design Sprint method makes every idea easier to conceptualize. That’s because less time and money is needed to flesh out the basics and see if the program is viable. Not only that, but this allows more ideas to be made because only a week is needed instead of a whole month or more.
How to Conduct a Design Sprint
You need a week for a Sprint and each day has specific goals. According to GV, this schedule should not be tampered with. Day one is for understanding the product. You will map out the ideas, ask experts their opinion and tell everyone the perfect outcome of the program. Day two is about sketching out ideas and solutions. Each member will create their own solution for making the idea a reality. Day three is for deciding on which solution to go with and sticking with it until the end.
Day four is for prototyping. Utilize the solution as much as possible and build something that users can work with. Day five is about validating the idea by using the prototype, showing it to decision makers and having at least five test users work with the product.
The Sprint needs a design team composed of different members. There should be engineers, decision makers, project managers and anyone else you can get. This ensures that everyone gets their perspective in before the process gets too far away from them. At the end of the fifth day you will be able to see if the design is viable or if the idea just doesn’t work.
Conclusion
A Design Sprint is the fastest way to build up ideas and see if they are viable for users. From here, good ideas can be built up even more and bad ideas can be discarded. It’s the most affordable way to see if an idea can compete in the market.