OmbuLabs Blog

This is part of our series on design sprints. If you haven’t read our previous articles, I encourage you to read more about our design sprint process.

Day 5 of the design sprint is about testing your prototype and getting feedback on your ideas. That way, you can quickly learn what is or isn’t working about the concept. Yesterday, the interviewer spent time putting together a list of questions for the interview sessions. Earlier this week, your team recruited 5 participants for Friday’s research. Now you are ready to do the dang thing.

Design Sprints lend themselves nicely to a virtual format, and digital tools can enhance this widely-used process developed by Google Ventures.

Day 3 is all about picking a direction and going forward with it. Over the course of the third day of the Design Sprint, we will assess which parts of our designs are most successful and create a storyboard to show the steps that our target customer might take towards achieving the goal.

Remember your sketches from Day 2? It’s time for the team to see them. The purpose of this activity is for the entire team to see each other’s work and get to pick out all the best pieces for our next activity.

The second day of the Design Sprint is about finding inspiration, looking back at the decisions made during Day 1, and starting to assemble possible solutions. Now that the team has narrowed down a problem space, it’s time to start the idea generation process again, but this time with sketches.

Have you found yourself in the fortunate position of being the only designer in an organization that doesn’t have any design assets or previous research? Lucky you! Now is the time to do things right and build a solid foundation for excellent research and design practices while also creating value as soon as possible. Here’s my approach to starting off on the right foot as a UX practitioner in an environment where you are breaking ground and creating UX assets from scratch.

Let’s deep-dive into what happens on the first day of a Design Sprint. On Mondays, we understand the problem.

I want to give credit to the creators of the Design Sprint method, Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz from Google Ventures who developed this Design Thinking method in the mid 2010s. Their process is the starting point from which all variations of Design Sprints come from, and I work with their framework to create Design Sprints that are customized to suit client needs.