Design Sprints and Agile UX

The design sprint comes a little bit unnatural to most ux and product designers. They’re used to more of a waterfall approach — as in — “you’ll get it when I am done” or “finish it by this date or you’re toast”.

Sprinting is taken from a scrum technique in agile, where projects are scoped into, often into bi-weekly, durations. Design can be adapted to this agile methodology, however it may take some time and some patience.

And when I refer to a design sprint, it is mostly in the form of a UX design sprint or a product design sprint. While other design fields could benefit, we are focusing specifically on these two areas.

In some ways, sprinting is similar to having a short deadline on a design project, but you are often biting off a smaller piece of a project to design to focus on.

Design sprinting can be a great process when you adapt to it. There are several key benefits I see:

• Reduced time and reduced scope = predictable schedule
• Higher focus on solving a specific problem = better solution
• Less time to focus on details that aren’t actually that important = pick good ideas quicker

Always be sprinting

Some people may use a design sprint to complete a specific project.

Others, like myself and team, are always functioning on a design sprint basis as a way of working.

So I am always in a design sprint. I love this way of working because it breaks work down into manageable chunks, and gives enough structure so you can tell if you are getting behind in the design sprint and need to mitigate.

5 Day design sprint

Types of design sprints

The 5 day design sprint

The 5 day design sprint, has largely been popularized by Jake Knapp at Google Ventures, in the book Sprint. It’s a great read and gives a lot of context to the benefits of the process. It should be noted that many designers have been sprinting prior to this book. It has come naturally to the large number of designers working in the applications and software space, because our developer counterparts were.

“We should do a 5 day design sprint boss, Google does it” may or may not be enough to convince most people. If it isn’t enough, just point them towards this book. It’s awesome that this book can facilitate design workshops and get people on board.

The process in the book can be summarized to:

Day one — Define problem and idea

Day two — Sketch solutions

Day three — Make decisions about solution and hypothesis

Day four — Build a prototype

Day five — Test the prototype

This process works great, IF you can get all of the stakeholders on board for participation (not easy). It’s also better suited for a design workshop than a consistent way of running a design group. I have found many challenges with trying to complete a 5 day design sprint on an ongoing basis.

The 2 week design sprint

The two week design sprint is better for projects that are a little bit more complex, and have more of a focus on complex interactions along with dealing with multiple stakeholders or teams.

It looks like this:

Day 1 — Define the problem and put together a workflow around the current state

Day 2 — Design studio/concept sketching, hypothesis

Day 3–5 — Build prototype

Day 6- Build a test plan

Day 7 — Test with users

Day 8 — Adapt to test

Day 9 — Retest if possible

Day 10 — Present to stakeholders

The 10 day design sprint allows you to focus more on a complex interactions, often get to a higher

level of fidelity and have time to react to design testing.

Another great resource for 2 week design sprints was recently published by Invision in their article

Hacking design sprints to work for your business.

At several places I have worked, we have used this duration and I have found it to be the most comfortable. This is also the more typical cadence that a development team might work on, so you can either work in tandem or a fixed amount of sprints ahead.

The 3 week design sprint

“But wait, I can’t fit all of my work into 2 weeks”, you say?

The three week design sprint is how I currently sprint in the UX group I work in. It’s the same structure as the two week sprint above, but with one week (5 days) of buffer at the end.

Buffer has saved me in many cases from having to roll current sprint work into the next sprint. It’s basically just a week to catch up if you have gotten behind in the 2 week sprint process.

It’s not unusual for a product owner, project manager or someone else in the company to come in with a request that tends to throw off the cadence or ability to complete a two week sprint. In the case of a three week sprint, this interruption just eats up a little bit of the buffer time. No problem.

If there isn’t interruptions in the sprint and teams finish their work in 2 weeks, and have an extra week, then you can do a couple things to fill the buffer gap.

• Start another sprint early
• Do research for the next project (usually my preference)
• Take on smaller projects
• Go out for margaritas and worry about the problem tomorrow

On my current UX team, different UX leads share a design studio day on rotate Thursdays. This day is great, but we have a limited amount of design slots available. That has been part of what dictated the duration of our sprints.

Design sprint communication

An important part of component of design sprints is communication. In my design sprints, we practice scrum stand ups.

Stand ups are a daily meeting of what you did yesterday, and what you are going to do today. This is also the time in which you bring up any “blockers”, or things that are hindering your ability to complete your current task in the sprint. They typically only take a few minutes depending on how many people are in your group.

I have found in the past, that this part of scrum in design sprints can prove to be challenging if you have a remote team. This get’s even worse if you have teams in other time zones or on the other side of the world.

Documentation or written communication is critical here if you are not able to carve out the time to meet over skype or phone.

Find a design sprint that works for you

You can really adapt design sprinting to any duration that you would like, and I encourage you to do so. Experimentation with design sprinting is how you can find your sweet spot.

No matter the duration, design sprints are a good choice in my opinion because they allow you to work more focused and efficiently.

It may feel awkward the first time around, but I encourage you to try design sprinting out.