OUR 20/20 DESIGN SPRINT

What is a Design Sprint?

A Design Sprint is a 5-day deep dive into designing a new product, adding new features, or improving existing ones, enabling companies to avoid the endless back-and-forth between team members to come to design decisions.

The goal of a Design Sprint is to answer business and marketing questions, and to create blueprints and prototypes to validate ideas and assumptions with actual users by the end of the week.

A Design Sprint condenses six months of work into five days.

Why you should run a Design Sprint 

• Save six months of time and resources
• Align team members toward a shared vision and goal, and get consensus from various disciplines to ensure that the end product meets all business, marketing, engineering and design requirements
• Validate design directions and test new ideas early on, where mistakes are much cheaper to fix
• Educate your team members about UX with a hands-on product design bootcamp
• It’s an awesome team-bonding exercise

A Design Sprint makes everyone on your team a product designer

How is our 20/20 Design Sprint different?

A traditional Design Sprint helps you answer a specific question by choosing one path of the user’s journey to follow and design, often leading to the (re)design of a single web page or app screen. Our Design Sprint helps you design an entire product in one week. This is done by adding two steps for capturing the entire product flow using a system map and attributes, and then translating that map into screen requirements for both web and mobile version of the product. 

In a traditional Design Sprint, you need your entire team in one room for a full week to make sure that you’re including your design, engineering, business and marketing experts into the conversation, and to have everyone work together to come up with the design.

An entire week of your team’s time is very expensive, and not everyone can be available during that week. 

Because we integrate everything we’ve learned from creating, launching and marketing products, we use our design and business experience to run 60% of the Design Sprint for you. Your team is only needed on the first day, the first half of the third day, and the second half of the last day.

Our Design Sprint saves you 3 days of your team’s time, compared to a traditional Design Sprint

 Traditional Design Sprint professionals simply help you design a feature or screen (what).

We work with you to define the entire spectrum, starting by refining your target market and audience (who), prioritizing their needs along with your business goals (why), designing prototypes to solve those needs (what), and then creating a marketing plan to reach your target audience with the new solution (how). 

Our Design Sprint is also a Business Sprint and a Marketing Sprint.

How does the 20/20 Design Sprint work?

DAY 1: DEFINE

We start the first day of our 20/20 Design Sprint by understanding and scoping the problem that the product will solve, the audience it will solve it for, the marketing goals it needs to hit, and the business requirements it needs to satisfy. We accomplish that by interviewing team members, and capturing their key points, top questions, and target metrics.

We then create users' journeys that capture how different users would use the final product to accomplish a task or reach a specific goal.

We also draw a system map of the product we will create, showing different objects, attributes and relationships between them. That map provides the foundation for creating screens, requirements and sketches.

DAY 2: DESIGN

On the second day, we review the journeys and map created on DAY 1, we then list all the screens that the product needs to have in order to make those users' journeys possible. Then, for each screen, we list all UI requirements, based on the system map, and the transitions in the users' journeys.

Once we list all screens, and the UI requirements for each of them, we review design inspirations from similar products in different industries, and capture design ideas for various features.

Finally, we start brainstorming and sketching the user interface for each screen, based on the requirements we've listed, and the ideas we've captured. At times, we end up with more than one design for some screens, for which we create prototypes on the following day to run through user tests.

DAY 3: PROTOTYPE

The third day starts with creating storyboards for different features and screens to define how users would interact with them, and how the UI will change in response to users' interactions.

Once we are done capturing those interactions and screen variations, we conduct a design review by walking through the users' journeys we have created on DAY 1, to make sure that all the tasks and transitions we have envisioned can be done using the screens and storyboards we have sketched.

We spend the second half of the third day creating rapid prototypes to validate features and split-test screens with real users, and we outline a test plan to get accurate quantitative and qualitative results from those plans.

A 3-Day Design Sprint ends when all UI sketches and prototypes are delivered.

DAY 4: TEST 

On the fourth day, we run 5 user tests using the prototypes we have created in DAY 3, each test lasting about 30-45 minutes.

On the second half of the day, we spend two hours compiling results, understanding quantitative data and qualitative surveys, and providing recommendations for how to modify the UI screens to integrate those findings into the final product blueprint.

A 4-Day Design Sprint ends with user testing insights and recommendations for design refinements are delivered

DAY 5: REFINE

 Once we have identified what needs to be refined and modified in our original UI sketches, we proceed with a second design iteration where we integrate those changes throughout screens and storyboards.

Finally, we conduct a final design review with a full walkthrough of the new screens and storyboards, using the users' journeys from DAY 1.

On the final hour of the last day, we sit with the team to provide our best recommendations for launching the products to the target audience, based on the extensive marketing experience we gained from launching and growing our own products.

Our Design Sprint can be 3, 4 or 5 days long, depending on the client's requirements, and can be done on-site, or online.

What are the deliverables?

At the end of the 5 days, you get boards containing users journeys, system maps, screens and requirements, UI sketches, storyboards, prototypes, and user testing insights.

Those deliverables are then shared with the rest of your team to create functional UI specifications, product roadmap, and to design more features in the future using the same design foundation.

Why you should try our Design Sprint

We have helped dozens of early stage startups, as well as mature enterprises, design and launch successful products to hundreds of millions of users.

We have also designed, developed and launched several of our own products to hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, and were endorsed by the most respected business publications and design blogs.

When you hire us to run your Design Sprint, you don't just get a "sprint facilitator". Instead, you get design, engineering, business and marketing experience that is integrated through every step of the design process.

Here are some of the companies that got incredible results from our process:

Can our Design Sprint make your product 5x better? Let's find out

Whether you're working on a brand new idea, redesigning an existing product, or planning an upcoming feature, we would love to hear about it, and to give you a free consultation with our best ideas, insights and recommendations.