Translated from 日本語 • View original Hello. This is Aimi Nakajima.
The other day, we held a Design Sprint Workshop for our internal members at the ISAO office!
If you are listening to a design sprint for the first time, give me an overview and an image of how to proceed. For those who already know about design sprints, I hope it will be helpful as an example, so I will write a blog post.
Table of Contents
- What is a Design Sprint?
- Why is Design Sprint effective?
- What is a Design Sprint after all?
- About ISAO Design Sprint Workshop
- ISAO Design Sprint Workshop Highlights
- Voices of workshop participants and management
- ISAO's UX process "Loop UX"
What is a Design Sprint?
Design Sprint is a design thinking framework proposed by GV (Google Ventures) in the United States. A team of about 7 people will be formed and will be focused on 5 days from Monday to Friday to extract issues and conduct user interviews using prototypes.
Also known as Google 5Days Design Sprint , it is a method that is widely spread mainly among Western startups, from technology companies such as Slack, UBER, and Savioke to B2C companies such as Blue Bottle Coffee.
Why Design Sprints Work
We receive many inquiries on a daily basis, such as "I want to create a new app" or "I want to renew my website...".
Even though it took several months to develop after many meetings, embodied requests and proposals as visible design proposals, and approved by decision-makers, it is often necessary to discover problems and notice unexpected user reactions after putting them out into the world as a service.
Software development is only 16% successful in the world, and the main reason is said to be a lack of user engagement and executive support. （※）
Quote from: Software development project success rate
On the other hand, design sprints offer the following significant benefits:
- Allows for more useful individual ideas in group discussions
- Let others try new ideas and see immediate reactions, so you can make decisions that don't rely on intuition or prediction.
- Avoid unnecessary investments, resulting in faster time to bring products and services to the world
What is a Design Sprint after all?
It may seem difficult, but the point is,
**Don't waste money and time, validate your ideas in just 5 days from generation to testing, and connect them to your business! **
This is an activity.
Let's take a look at "So, what and how do you do it specifically?" in the workshop we actually conducted.
About ISAO Design Sprint Workshops
Reason for holding the event
ISAO develops and produces both in-house services and client services, but depending on the project, it is still not possible to discuss from a service perspective that transcends the boundaries of roles, and there may be a division of labor.
Rather than the flow of production and development by designers and engineers after planning by planners as shown in the figure on the left, it is necessary for everyone to be involved in planning and think deeply about UX before doing their own work, as shown in the figure on the right.
ISAO's corporate vision is to realize services that will make hundreds of millions of people hot, so members with a passionate heart for UX design have risen up, saying, "Let's take root in design thinking more in-house!"
Planning and Management System
These three people became facilitators and planned and operated.
Nobu
He is the chief designer of ISAO and an expert in human-centered design (HCD). In Texas, USA, where I am on a business trip, I have experience holding a 5-Days Sprint Workshop for an American team.
Minami is a designer of ISAO. 3rd year as a new graduate. Aiming to be a designer like Nobu, he is accumulating experience. His specialty is high-speed prototyping.
Aimi (Author) Marketer at ISAO. Participated in a Sprint workshop at AJ&Smart in Berlin. I also read the 5Days Sprint book by Jake Knapp of Google Ventures in English.
Google's official How to Documentation
In addition to the aforementioned books, some of the materials are quoted from the Design Sprint Kit, which is officially released by Google. It is a material for short 3 days instead of 5 days, and the illustrations and colorful world view will stimulate your creative desire.
Themes and Grouping
The theme was about ISAO's in-house service " Goalous", the most open internal SNS to achieve goals.
The event was held in three teams × seven people, mainly engineers, designers, directors, and marketers who are involved in web services and apps on a daily basis.
By the way, since it is composed of three countries: Americans, Brazilians, and Japanese, only one team is bound to English!
ISAO Design Sprint Workshop Highlights
This time, I focused on understanding the basic concepts and balancing the work, and made it as follows.
| Day | Phases | Contents |
|---|---|---|
| Step1 | Discovery | Classroom Lectures, Interviews, and Work |
| Step2 | Idea Sketch | Classroom Lectures & Work |
| Step3 | Decision | Work |
| Step4 | Prototyping | Classroom Lectures and Little Experience |
| Step5 | Testing & Evaluation | Classroom |
I have omitted a lot of the program because it has condensed the program of about 40 hours over 5 days into only 2.5 hours.
This time, I made the first half thicker and the second half was done subtly.
We will introduce step by step how we actually proceeded.
Step1 First half: Monday AM
This phase determines the outline of the sprint.
While using the example of Blue Bottle Coffee's Sprint, we interviewed the members who plan and develop Goalous.
What is > Goalous's Long Term Goal? "Improving the team strength of organizations around the world"
After making this goal a common understanding for everyone, we discussed the concerns and questions we wanted to clarify in the future. For example...
- GKA (Goal・Key Result・Action) to the user? - What if there are 0 Goalous users?
Step1 Second half: Monday PM
Next, visualize the flow of services used by each customer (CEO, team manager, and employee) on the MAP.
As a user observation, we asked an intern university student to actually go through the process from Goalous membership registration to action posting.
While observing the movements and facial expressions of the mouse, each person took note of the points they noticed on the post-its.
There were unexpected stumbling blocks and hesitations, and it seems that I was able to gain a lot of awareness.
During user observation, they fill out a self-asked problem discovery note called HMW (How Might We).
"Can we convey the concept of GKA to first-time users?" "Can we make the first setup shorter and easier?"
Everyone votes seriously and anonymously in front of the whiteboard about which flow of each persona is problematic.
In Sprints, decisions are never made by majority vote, but are chosen by decision-makers called Deciders.
In the end, the product owner, Atsuhira, was decided.
Focus on the initial setup flow for team admins!
Step2: Tuesday
The next step is important for individual creativity.
How can I improve the initial setup flow to make the experience better?
Everyone runs the pen seriously.
Step3: Wednesday
In a short time, I finished the idea memo into a series of stories, and voted here.
Sprints are calculated so that the opinions of loud people are not adopted, and the hierarchical relationship is reluctant to say the truth.
By quietly voting on anonymous ideas, you can focus on the content rather than whose ideas are not.
Step4-5: Thursday to Friday
Introduction to prototyping using Invision and experience of the evaluation function that can be performed by multiple people at the same time.
There is no single set tool in ISAO, but depending on the project, we use Invision, Prott, Adobe XD, etc.
Voices from workshop participants and what the management side noticed
Here are some of the voices from the members after the end. Overall, it was well received!
- It was very nice to be able to experience the purpose of improving the service, how to set goals, and how to proceed.
- It made me think again about the importance of design thinking and user perspective!
- I thought that this kind of workshop could not be used in actual work, but I made a very new discovery.
- I wanted to do more work!
- I would like to try it as a practical project that I am currently involved in.
Notice from the management.
- How English-based sprint terminology can be replaced with catchy and understandable Japanese
- To get them to experience it all, build a workshop that lasts a little longer
- Plan separate programs that are more study-oriented and those that are more practical
I think I received honest feedback from internal members. I would like to improve it in the future.
ISAO's UX Process "Loop UX"
ISAOでは、GVのデザインスプリント・IDEOの人間中心設計の思想に沿った独自のUXデザインフレームワーク『Loop UX』を用いています。
<img src="https://ckmediastgstr.blob.core.windows.net/uploads/ISAO_Loop_UX_1024x768_2d5f4cb296.jpeg" alt="ISAO Loop UX" width="800" ¥class="aligncenter" />
In addition to design sprints that are conducted over five days, we also provide design thinking methods tailored to each company and product with excerpts.
It is recommended for companies like this.
- I have a new business idea and want to verify its commercialization.
- I want to renew web services, apps, etc., but I haven't been able to solve the problem
- I want to incorporate user feedback and conduct test research and demonstration experiments.
Please feel free to contact us on the ISAO corporate website!