Remote design sprints
This week following the kick-off of a ‘discovery’ project and the customer research, it was time to pull all the insights together and move forward with the ideation part of the discovery stage.
For this project that I am leading, I have 1 other UX designer, 2 UI designers and 1 product owner involved. There are a few of us because the project spans across the products that all of us take responsibility for.
It’s important that we are all involved and work collaboratively, so I decided that for the ideation and design part of the project I would adopt some of the methods from the design sprint book by Jake Knapp.
So, last Friday following the customer research we input all our insights across the various conversations into a Miro board, using different coloured post-it notes for each participant, so we knew who said what. I ran a workshop that saw us categorising the insights into emerging themes.
Following this workshop I gave each person 3 voting dots, that they could place next to the post-it notes that they felt were most important in helping us achieve the goal of the discovery project. This activity was done asynchronously so as to give everyone the space and thinking time they needed. A deadline was set for Monday at 11am.
This Monday at 11am, I then ran a 'crazy-8s' workshop. We began by reviewing our votes and agreeing based on where the majority were clustered, the top 3 areas we wanted to continue focusing on for the rest of the discovery stage. We then allowed ourselves 20 minutes to capture down our notes around these 3 areas by looking back at all our documentation so far, again this was done separately. We then came together 20 minutes later to start a sketching workshop that saw us rapidly sketching different ideas on the 3 different topics. This is done by folding a piece of A4 paper into 8, so that you have 8 small rectangles, and to set a timer for 8 minutes giving you 1 minute to fill in each square with an idea or concept. We ran 3 of these in quick succession to keep momentum, and within 30 minutes we had completed the activity. We all took photos of our papers and uploaded them into the Miro board for all to see.
The next activity from the Sprint book is to then compile more comprehensive 'solution sketches'. We are working on this asynchronously and will reconvene on Wednesday afternoon to run an 'Art Gallery' activity where we discuss each and talk through them. Another voting session will happen after and we will continue our design from there...
I have really enjoyed taking some of the activities and ideas from the Sprint book and applying them to a project that isn't strictly a 'sprint'. I think particularly when you are remote, it would be difficult to run a sprint in the same timings as the book, due to the difference in energy required to sustain a remote call for a long time, and handle workshops remotely. You certainly need to take more conscious breaks and give people time to work away from the group as well as with when you are remote. There are also some fantastic tools out there such as Miro that can assist when working remotely. I've learnt a huge amount remote facilitation that will help me with future projects.















