1. Understand
The first day of a design sprint is all about getting insights – we want to gain a full understanding of your user requirements, business needs, and technology capabilities. Discussion during this stage is essential to create a roadmap for the sprint week.
At the very beginning, we identify long-term goals, obstacles, and challenges. We run some exercises to paint a bigger picture of the problem. At the end of the day, you pick the main goal you want to achieve during the sprint – the aim is to choose a target that is ambitious but manageable and able to be solved in a week. In this phase, we will use tools such as stakeholder mapping and user personas to inform our decision-making.
2. Diverge
On the second day, we focus on generating and exploring as many ideas as possible. We’ll first review existing solutions, including their strong and weak points. The participants will also perform exercises to build new insights and develop solutions.
Through brainstorming sessions and individual analyses, each team member will come up with ideas that will later be studied and tested. Customer journey mapping is particularly helpful in this phase for gaining a deeper understanding of how users interact with a product. It is also an important step in identifying user pain points.
3. Converge
At this stage, we’ll have plenty of ideas that the team came up with during the previous two steps, which is great, but they can’t all go forward for testing. The team’s goal now is to identify the best ideas and decide which of them should be prototyped in the following step.
To achieve this, we’ll critique each solution in relation to the main goal. Based on the selected ideas, we’ll create a storyboard and sketch a step-by-step roadmap for building a prototype.
4. Prototype
On the fourth day, it’s time to put all that the team has developed into practice. You will turn your storyboard into a prototype – a realistic artifact that you will then test with a customer.
The main assumption here is that you will only build the customer-facing surface of your product or service – the aim is to keep it as low-fi as possible while still allowing you to get answers to your questions. In this way, the prototype will be up and running in just one day – ready for review in the final stage.
There are two common ways to create a prototype – a paper prototype is particularly quick and cheap to create while a digital prototype can be interactive and lets you test interactions more realistically.
5. Test
GV calls this phase the “moment of truth”. This is when you test your ideas with users, business stakeholders, and technical experts and hear direct feedback from them. You can gain valuable insights from interviewing users and learn by watching as they interact with your prototype.
This stage will validate your solutions before you invest any money on designing and developing your product. At the end of the fifth day, you’ll have a clear idea of the road ahead and know what you should do next.