My experience at a recent Google Design Sprint i was able to attend at Google office in Bangalore. A few startups from the co-working space ‘Jaaga’ was selected for a Design Sprint organized by Google Developer Relations Team in Bangalore, our’s was one of them. It was a 2 day workshop that takes through the Design Sprint Process.
So what is Design Sprint?
“Design Sprint is simply a structured brainstorm based on design thinking and agile development.”-GV
Design sprint is basically a structured process to build solutions fast keeping the end user in mind. The sprint’s are carried out on a five-day where you try to come up with a working prototype very fast and validate it with users. We have seen that as a startup you have very limited resources and short period of time. It is a constant rush to come up with a solution that is useful to your customers and which sustains your venture.
Looking at the agile development methods like Lean Startup where we are pushed to come up with a working prototype iteratively in a very short period of time, while still maintaining the quality of your solutions. But this still involves steps where you have to build your solution, launch it and then validate with your user. This takes time and effort just to figure out if your solution is what the user wants.
The sprint process is a shortcut to this existing development where you come up with a real looking mock up prototype without actually building it. Using various online tools like InVisionApp or any high fidelity prototype tools. Once the prototype is built it is tested with actual customers to get their feedback’s and plan for the next steps in your product development.
The entire Design Sprint process is spread across 6 different stages.
- Understand
- Define
- Diverge
- Decide
- Prototype
- Validate
I’ll be writing a series of articles on what we learnt from the workshop starting from our initial preparation before the Design Sprint workshop and how we started implementing in our startup.
Have a look at some of the resources below to get deeper understanding of Design Sprint process.