Imagine you have a great app idea. Maybe you are a project manager in charge of expanding the product line at a large company. Maybe you are the founder of a startup that is getting funding? All of these scenarios have one thing in common: RISK!
The risk of uncertainty, the risk of failure, the risk of missing the target or the target audience, the risk of spending money, time and effort to build a product or realize an idea that has not yet been met… There is no end to it. When a limited budget is added to these risks, it is usually inevitable that ideas will be abandoned or the product will be delayed. However, there is a method that eliminates all these risks: Design Sprint. Without high investments, you can get your customer (or investor) to comment on your idea with an interactive prototype, and test the product in real life with low costs.
So, to avoid wasting your time, money and reputation, let's take a quick look at how useful a design sprint is and how you can save time, money and reputation in a short time.
Thanks to this content; You will learn what the design sprint methodology is in detail, how it is done and what it provides, which helps you design your ideas together with users, create prototypes and solve problems by testing.
Design Sprint Nedir?
Design Sprint is a method for quickly gathering information about your users, prototyping ideas, and validating them, lasting at least five days depending on the project. Along with design thinking, it has become one of the hottest topics of our time.
The great thing about the Design Sprint methodology is that it’s a tried and true formula that has been tried and proven in real life. For five days, a small group focuses on solving a problem generated from the long-term goal, extracting actionable insights, prototyping and testing a possible solution.
How To?
The purpose of Design Sprint is;
- Building a working prototype
- Testing the prototype with users within a week
- Incorporating user feedback at the very beginning of the design process.
Learn, discover and create what works best for the types of problems you are trying to solve!
Once you know what problem you want to solve and have your team and materials together, you can start having fun. You can start the 5-stage Design Sprint process by gathering:
- The problem to be solved
- Team
- Materials
So what are these 5 Design Sprint stages?
- Understanding & Defining
- Idea Generation & Sketching
- To decide
- Prototyping
- Verification
Stage 1: Identification
The sprint team agrees on a long-term goal, maps out the problem, and decides what part of the challenge you can solve in one week.
Stage 2: Idea Generation & Sketching
At this stage, ideas are started to be generated and visualized (sketched) to solve the problem by getting inspiration from existing solutions and creating various strategies that can be used.
Stage 3: Decision Making
The sprint team reviews the solutions found and finalizes the concept of the product to be prototyped. Storyboards are then created to help the user visually anticipate and explore a product experience.
Stage 4: Prototyping
This is the stage where the Design Sprint team works together to bring the concept to life and create a prototype. It is also the moment when concrete decisions are made about what the concepts on which the design is based are or what they contain. You may want to make as realistic prototypes as possible to validate these decisions, but remember that being fast is as important as the prototype itself.
Stage 5: Verification
Up to this stage, promising solutions have been created, the best ones have been selected and a realistic prototype has been created. In this stage, which we are now approaching the end, the Design Sprint team presents the created concept to the users. This is the moment when the product meets the user. By getting feedback from the users who interact with the prototype and watching their reactions to your prototype, it is understood what works and what does not. This testing and verification stage makes the entire sprint valuable and guides the understanding of what to do next.
What do we achieve as a result of the Design Sprint?
The best outcome of this whole journey is that it gives you feedback on your idea. With a realistic prototype and user data in hand, it becomes much easier to decide on next steps or convince your managers that this idea is the right one.
Most of the time, you’ll use this feedback to improve the product during the design phase. Other times, it’ll be used to completely change the direction of your business. But either way, you’ll save yourself a ton of effort, time, and budget.
After all, in today’s world, the user is at the center. The main benefit of the design sprint process is that it is completely user-centric. So, if you want to create products and services based on a solid understanding of what your end user wants, then a design sprint might be the right solution for you.
You can develop your concept by doing another Design Sprint to finalize the developed idea and solution, or you can use this realistic prototype to sell your product or service to potential customers (or investors).
You don’t have to design the Design Sprint methodology all by yourself! With the Design Sprint methodology, you can stop thinking and start doing. If you want to talk about Design Sprint for your company or project, we are sure you will enjoy the collaborative nature of this process.
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