How to Cut Design Sprints in Half

Any company that has created a product in the digital sphere will no doubt be familiar with the purpose of design sprints. Traditionally both back-end and front-end developers, designers, marketing teams and other stakeholders in the company come together over the course of five days to prototype ideas, gather insights on users and validate them before building solutions with company resources.

Like most startups we are always extremely busy and getting people to work for five days felt like a lot—even two days was a stretch for some, so we decided to see if we could come up with a way to get the same results in a fraction of the time.

Traditional design sprints are held over five key days to help:

• Understand –  Map a challenge and particular focus area.
• Ideate – Come up with many design solutions.
• Decide – Turn those design solutions into a storyboard.
• Prototype – Create a prototype based on those storyboards.
• Test – See how live users interact with the prototype and learn to iterate further.

For our design sprint this time, we wanted to test another approach for the first three steps in the process (understanding, ideating and deciding). Instead of taking three days to complete the majority of the design sprint, we wanted to test if we could deliver similar results in four hours. We did, handing off storyboards to our designer for testing and iterating with live users. This cut a normal five-day design sprint in half. This is how we did it.

The Purpose of Our Design Sprint

We were creating a top-secret brand new feature we wanted to add to our product that required the design sprint in the first place. At Usersnap, as a customer feedback company, it is probably no surprise that we use our product to collect feedback from people using our products, do extensive research on that feedback and take our findings directly to a design sprint for ideation and prototyping.

Preparation Is Key for Shortened Design Sprints

If you want to cut your design sprint in half, make sure you have the following in advance:

1. Research on our target personas (we conducted 20 interviews and collected 130 survey responses).
2. A clearly defined and agreed-upon challenge for your design sprint team to tackle.
3. The deliverables at the end of the session.

Desired outcome: Make sure everyone is clear and aligned on the challenge to tackle.

You may wonder: “Why would you prepare these things beforehand when all of this could be discussed during the design sprint?”

We wanted to give people time to sit with the challenge and have ideas to present during the design sprint, and save the time that was used just getting everyone up to speed.

Understand (1 hour)

Instead of a full day to understand the challenge, we used one hour. How is this possible, you ask? Our participants came prepared in advance and our in-house researchers had extensively analyzed the findings from our research stage.

Presentations (15 minutes)

First, each expert presented the findings of our target persona and their pain points. There were three researchers who each had five minutes to present the qualitative, quantitative and nuanced aspects of the persona’s pain points. With a short period of time, our researchers were forced to focus on the most important problems of our persona.

While presenting, the other participants wrote down “How Might We’s” (HMWs) on post-it notes. HMWs frame challenges in question form and these post-it notes are integral to the ideation stage.

Desired outcome: Understand the persona of the chosen design sprint challenge.

Expert Interviews (45 minutes)

Second, researchers were interviewed by the participants to learn more about the persona’s challenges. We set the timer for 15 minutes for each researcher and fired away with our questions.

Desired outcome: Expand on particular points that participants wanted to know more about.

While Q&A continued, respondents continued writing HMWs on post-it notes.

Ideate (1.5 hours) and Decide (1.25 hours)

Ideation and decision takes two days in total, according to the design sprint manual, and we gave ourselves less than three hours.

Problems Worth Solving (30 minutes)

First, we set the timer for three minutes, and all of us came up with our top three HMWs to put on the wall. When time expired, we presented our HMWs and placed them on the wall in order of our persona’s job steps. If a HMW is repeated, we either replaced it because it’s more relevant, or threw it away.

From there, we all received three stickers, set the timer for three more minutes and proceeded to vote on which three HMWs were most relevant to the persona’s pain points. The voting is not meant to eliminate less relevant HMWs, but to clarify what the group thinks is most important.

Desired outcome: Focus the group on problems to solve within the persona’s challenges.

Crazy 8s (1 hour)

Next, we did two rounds of Crazy 8s. At this point, we were breezing along, and even my own expectations were exceeded: We were getting close to designing something in a fraction of the time it normally takes!

The steps to Crazy 8s are simple:

1. Take a large piece of paper, and fold it into eight parts (“tiles”).
2. Set the timer for eight minutes, and begin.
3. Provide up to eight screen designs based on any of the HMWs written down (those that made it to the wall and those that didn’t).
   • Less than eight screen designs? No problem.
   • Want to present a flow with multiple tiles? Go for it.
4. When the eight minutes are up, place each piece of paper on the wall.
5. Present three of your eight ideas to the group and explain what problem the design should solve.
6. Repeat the process a second time; combine ideas from others or expand on them.

Desired outcome: Demonstrate how we could solve a problem related to the persona’s pain points.

Decide (1.25 hours)

Storyboards (1 hour, then 15 minutes)

Next, we broke up the design sprint team into two groups, making sure there weren’t too many participants with substantial design sprint experience in a group.

We set the timer for one hour, and each group came up with a storyboard flow with five sheets of paper. We didn’t give clear guidance on how to design the storyboard, but it should represent five key steps to reach a goal. If both groups approached the problem in the same way, it provided good insights on the nuances of the problem. If each group approached the problem differently, it provided perspective to the problem itself.

Desired outcome: Design screens in an order that tackle the challenge of the design sprint for our persona.

We then presented our storyboards. Each group had five minutes (set your timers!), and time for quick Q&A afterwards.

Retrospective (15 minutes)

Finally, it was time to conduct a quick retrospective. Each participant had three minutes to provide their thoughts:

• What did you like?
• What didn’t you like?
• What could we improve?
• Any additional comments?

Handover for Prototyping and Testing

From there, we handed the HMWs, Crazy 8s solutions and storyboards to our designer to develop a prototype, do user testing and iterate on the design. From previous prototypes, we knew that we would hear a lot of the same feedback from the participants. So we decided to change relevant and obvious flows right away and test an already modified version with the next participant. This process allowed us to achieve a more relevant flow in a shorter time.

In the end, none of this was or would be possible without customer research. It was the foundation of our design sprint, and we used our own product to collect feedback and organize it in a way that gave us sound insights leading up to our design sprint.

Those four hours yielded great results for the type of challenge we wanted to solve, and we didn’t use three days to get there. It took us longer to get to a tested prototype, but only one or two people were involved and they didn’t dedicate 100% of their time to the prototype iteration. This process fits better to our day-to-day schedule.

Trimming Design Sprint Time

We found the process very helpful and will do it again, always re-evaluating where we can improve. For anyone who would try this method:

1. Be sharp and clear on the goal.
2. Have well-prepared participants.
3. Keep your timers handy.
4. Question the quality of your results.
5. Let us know if we’re onto something.

Happy sprinting!