The tech product building has seen a huge evolution in design. User experience and User Interface Design are two important things discussed in detail while the foundation of any tech product is based.
The idea of making design sprints is to ensure that any layman can easily use your application without complications. Think of WhatsApp; it is designe so that any non-tech-savvy person can use it without putting effort into learning to use it.
Design Sprints these days are the buzzwords that still most people take time to comprehend. But in a nutshell, this is a 5 Day process followed by Google, where several team designs disrupt services and products. A design sprint gives you a clear idea about what you are looking for with a proven answer.
Jake Knapp created the Design Sprint
Jake Knapp from Google Ventures was the one who spearheaded the design Sprint methodology. Design sprint helps you find the practical answer to the most important question, how to solve several months of work in just a few days. Moreover, it makes you listen to the voice of customers, which is quite necessary nowadays for the success of the products.
As per the 2016 study, it was found that only one-third of firms listened to the voice of customers and considered their views in the decision-making process.
The 4 Major Components that your team gets after a Design Sprint
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Proof of Concept
During the design sprint, the ideal goal of the whole activity is to bring the idea to reality by building a small proof of concept tested on end users. This helps you to get concrete feedback, learning, and concrete material about the usability and desirability of the idea. Also, it gives you the foundation to align with your team members with a common vision and well-defined products and goals. Moreover, it gives you a complete understanding if you are going in the right direction.
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End Customer testing
Once you have proof of concept, the next step is to make it available for the early customers. This goal is to get your prototype tested and get valuable feedback. During the end customer testing, all the aspects of the prototype are tested, such as how they perceive your product, whether it is easy for the users to use, whether they can figure out the usability and whether the information is accessible. All these things are considered to offer you a comprehensive report along with users’ views and recommendations.
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An End-user testing Report
At the end of the sprint, Users’ feedback and observations are collected and put into the report. Based on the report and clear KPIs, the team works on the further steps and decides if the prototype or the idea is worthy of developing a complete end-to-end product. The whole concept of the user testing report is to ensure a user-centered vision for your opinion.
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A Storyboard
The biggest question after idealizing any concept is “Where to start from and how to develop”? Well, the Design sprint helps you build an easy-to-understand story board with all the steps needed to validate your idea. Indeed, A storyboard is the collection of every step you would like to test and would bring more clarity on when you would need to build the prototype. At this step of the design sprint, the team often starts to understand and think about some important aspects of the product and tries to challenge the prototype.
How is the Design sprint beneficial for you and your Business?
There are a lot of benefits of design sprints mentioned in the following sections, which would help you to build a complete end-to-end product.
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Gives you a great experience
The design sprint brings along several opportunities which bring you as a team closer and work together on one common goal. All the days during the design sprint are spent together to get the context of the product and bring up cohesion and a sense of belonging among the team members. Also, it helps to gather different members of the company who are not much into design. Once the web design sprint is over, the team is quite close and has discovered a new way of viewing things and understanding them.
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Immersive Design Thinking Mindset
A design thinking methodology is a problem-solving approach that inspires the design sprint. Many techniques and new methods are applied together during the five days of the process. Here people not only learn about how to implement the strategies but also help them to develop a certain mindset for the upcoming projects. The methodologies are often designed with user-centric perspectives and analytical research that, once amalgamated, lead to some discoveries and innovations. It also helps to save time and money in many cases.
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Brings more learning to the table
After the Design sprint is completed, the team members have learned a lot of new concepts that can be utilized with different business opportunities and the target product. Also, it helps the members of your company experts in their fields to become design sprint facilitators and a decision maker. During the sprint, you and your team deep dive into the design world and learn from different team members. This is quite a great experience that helps you to grow and learn more things.
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Increases the Productivity- and Focus
Since there is only a short time for you to tackle a single problem. Break it down into smaller and manageable modules which can be easily tackle serially or parallelly. It brings out more productivity with less effort and time to work on them than what would be needed otherwise. Also, Design sprints encourage the team members to work on the same idea, which brings up more motivation. Also, it helps people to engage and build up their morale levels to focus on a problem.
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Improvises the decision-making process
During the design sprint, everyone works together toward a small problem that is broken, perceives a larger problem, and individually comes up with a possible solution for each piece. This makes it quite easy to decide what solution would be worth trying. Also, it makes the decision-making much quicker because there is a much clearer understanding of the problem.
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Simplifies the solution for any complex design task
The goal of designing a sprint from the beginning is to work with your stakeholders and build an explicit vision for the success or failure of the sprint. The biggest reason to make a design sprint is to discover some of the pain points and bring some valuable solutions.
As there is a lot of effective communication, it empowers the team members to share ideas, doubts, and risks for their final decisions. The collaborative approach to solving any problem offers an easy way to reach the answers to complicated issues in less time which would have been harder in a different environment.
How Design Sprint helps you to launch a holistic product?
The key benefits of the design sprints are the following if you are looking forward to launching a new product in the market.
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Fast prototyping
Once the idea validation succeeds, the best tool to achieve is to build a prototype. The sprint is also make for the same only. It makes prototype development quite easy and fastens the process. While the design sprint ends after 5days, you have a prototype ready for testing.
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Reduces the risk
The sprint reduces the months of thinking and development of any product. The faster you build the prototype, the more quickly you can validate it. Design sprints encourage sharing ideas, communicating, and dispelling any doubts. Also, this process enables us to get answers to any complex problem statement.
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It helps to build software that meets your end goals.
A software development process can be quite costlier and bring anxiety among the team members. It is essential to know the crucial needs and the software features that are needed. With product design sprint, developers can not only work on the prototype but also do complete end-to-end testing.
Conclusion
Sometimes, converting some great ideas into engaging, thoughtful, and elegant products is hard. It also becomes harder when you and your customers are not aligne while creating the products, especially for the big teams. Design sprints help you to form better solutions that your customers would like to use and promote. It is also improves the overall growth of your Business.
As per the recent study conducted by IBM, research based on design thinking can reduce the effort and the delivery time by 75%. A lot of big tech giants like Facebook, Medium, and Slack are quite big fans of design sprint.
If you look at the benefits, there is a lot of value-added while conducting a product design sprint. This is not the solution for every complex problem, but it gives a starting point for inspiration. With a design sprint, any complex and inefficient process becomes easier to solve. Also, many mobile app development companies are using this to build some good products for clients.
