The Design Sprint Process, a powerful tool developed by Google Ventures, condenses months of development into a collaborative, intensive process. At Nansen, we're experts in helping businesses leverage design sprints to unlock critical answers and drive growth.
How Design Sprints Empower Your Team
Design sprints allow you to:
- Quickly Validate Your Ideas: Test your assumptions and identify the most promising solutions before investing significant resources. Stop wasting time on ideas that might not resonate with your audience.
- Reduce Risk: Get honest user feedback early and often to avoid costly mistakes. Design sprints help you identify potential roadblocks before you pour resources into development.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions: Base your choices on concrete user insights, not guesswork. Design sprints provide valuable data to guide your product roadmap and ensure you’re building the right things for your customers.
Getting Started
Here's our adaptation of the five-day design sprint process:
Day 1: Align & Define
Set the stage for success by clearly defining the challenge and desired outcome. We’ll bring your cross-functional team together to ensure everyone is on the same page and leverage insights from internal and external experts.
Day 2: Brainstorm & Sketch
Unleash your team’s creativity! We’ll facilitate a structured brainstorming session to generate a variety of solutions. Then, we'll quickly sketch out rough prototypes to explore different concepts visually.
Day 3: Decide & Prototype
Through collaborative decision-making, we’ll identify the most promising solution to focus on. Next, we’ll build a basic, functional prototype to simulate the user experience.
Day 4: Test & Learn
It’s time to get user feedback! We’ll conduct targeted user interviews to gather crucial insights on your prototype. Analyzing this data allows you to validate your solution's effectiveness and shape future iterations.
Day 5: Wrap Up & Iterate
Summarize key learnings from the sprint and share them with the team. Collectively, we’ll decide on next steps for further development and refinement based on the valuable user feedback you’ve received.
From Problem to Prototype in Just 5 Days
We recently partnered with a client facing a critical challenge: their existing intranet system was nearing its expiration date, and they needed a complete overhaul. Traditional development approaches often involve lengthy delays, but the new intranet needed to be built quickly.
Here’s how the design sprint helped:
- Rapidly Defined the Challenge: We facilitated a collaborative session to define the core problem and user needs for the new intranet. This ensured everyone was aligned from the beginning, eliminating confusion and fostering a clear vision.
- Fast-Tracked Ideas: Structured brainstorming sessions allowed the team to generate and refine a variety of creative solutions quickly. This exploration led to the identification of the most promising approach for further development.
- Made Data-Driven Decisions Through User Testing: Prototypes were rapidly built and tested with real users, providing valuable insights. This data-driven approach allowed the team to make informed decisions and avoid costly mistakes.
The Result: A Clear Path Forward
In less than a week, the design sprint workshop yielded a clear roadmap for building a user-friendly intranet system. This eliminated the pitfalls of lengthy development cycles and allowed the client to move forward with confidence.
Are you ready to take the next step on your path to digital maturity? Download our full Incremental Innovation guide to start making small changes that pack a big impact.
