Design sprint?

Our hack week at CERN to reproduce the WorldWideWeb browser was five days long. That’s also the length of a design sprint. So …was what we did a design sprint?

I’m going to say no.

On the surface, our project has all the hallmarks of a design sprint. A group of people who don’t normally work together were thrown into an instense week of problem-solving and building, culminating in a tangible testable output. But when you look closer, the journey itself was quite different. A design sprint is typical broken into five phases, each one mapped on to a day of work:

1. Understand and Map
2. Demos and Sketch
3. Decide and Storyboard
4. Prototype
5. Test

There was certainly plenty of understanding, sketching, and prototyping involved in our hack week at CERN, but we knew going in what the output would be at the end of the week. That’s not the case with most design sprints: figuring out what you’re going to make is half the work. In our case, we knew what needed to be produced; we just had to figure out how. Our process looked more like this:

1. Understand and Map
2. Research and Sketch
3. Build
4. Build
5. Build

Now you could say that it’s a kind of design sprint, but I think there’s value in reserving the term “design sprint” for the specific five-day process. As it is, there’s enough confusion between the term “sprint” in its agile sense and “design sprint”.

What design sprints are good for — Cennydd Bowles

Cennydd enumerates what design sprints are good for:

• generating momentum,
• highlighting the scope of the design process,
• developing the team, or
• provoking core product issues.

And also what they’re not so good for:

• reliable product design,
• proposing sophisticated user research,
• answering deep product-market fit questions, or
• getting the green light.

A 5 day sprint with Clear Left exploring library self-service machine software – Leon Paternoster

Myself and Batesy spent last week in Ipswich doing an intense design sprint with Suffolk Libraries. Leon has written up process from his perspective as the client—I’ll try to get a case study up on the Clearleft website soon.

This is really great write-up; it captures the sense of organised chaos:

I can’t recommend this kind of research sprint enough. We got a report, detailed technical validation of an idea, mock ups and a plan for how to proceed, while getting staff and stakeholders involved in the project — all in the space of 5 days.