Let’s say you have an idea for a brand/product and want to publish it on the market. You need to up your game and determine whether or not to invest time in your ideas. For such dilemmas and queries, Google Ventures proposed a platform to help start-ups to overcome business and marketing hurdles they are faced with.
What Are Design Sprints?
“The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers.”, as it says on the website.
Google has created this profoundly structured five-day process with activities assigned for each day to help participants/entrepreneurs come up with assertive solutions for their business ideas.
Design Sprints allow you to design, sell and govern sprints that deliver valuable and assertive acumens. It also helps you understand who are your customers and what’s mattering to them. It lets you test your web interface and products to be certain if it really works.
It’s quintessential to have a club of participants coming together from different fields resulting in a working prototype sketched for your needs.
Affordable web development services use Design Sprints as an innovation protocol.
How Design Sprints Structure their five-day process
Individuals are grouped to work and learn better. This also teaches them to be in a team and grow their leadership qualities. If there are no groups, Design Sprints cannot exist.
Each Design Sprint consists of 5 following phases:
Monday: The groups are assigned to specialists across the Google Ventures organization to recognize their ultimate aspirations and create a plan for the rest of the week. This is to understand your goals and space clearly.
Tuesday: The groups start to spitball ideas and creations to solve their ideas faced with business difficulties. Each individual in the group would grab a pen/pencil to sketch out their ideas and solutions which could potentially help their case.
Wednesday: The groups discuss the solutions that came across while sketching out on Tuesday; You should be able to eliminate and decide which one of them works best for your brand/product.
Thursday: The groups transmute their sketches into a realistic functioning prototype, storyboards created in the past days will easily help you make a working prototype. Your prototype should be ready for the final testing by now.
Friday: The final prototype is up for testing with real live users. This is the chance to not only validate your prototype with potential customers but also stakeholders and engineers. Test with a minimum of 5 users to get a good idea of what are your goals next
Benefits of Design Sprint
- Sprints allow you to make decisions, come up with solutions and a working prototype in a crunched period of time. This shows how fast you can adapt and process. You are able to execute the work of several months in just 5 days, this is the fastest way to test your efficiency and work ethics.
- Having a group of stakeholders, investors, and engineers together working with you on the same project helps you really gain an insight and it’s much easier to come up with solutions.
- Design Sprints are an advocate for creative and innovative thinking. They allow you to manifest your thoughts into sketching your dream prototype rather than getting outright rejected by the company world. It gives you the freedom to experiment and learn.
- You learn how teamwork is an essential part of the process and how people from across the world have something new to share.
- Using Design Sprints, the best website design agencies have drastically improved their productivity.
- Time constraints help boost creativity and drives you to make decisions quicker. No more procrastination and piling your work until the last moment.
- You can reduce your risks of failure and a capital loss on creative ideas. You can scrunch months of development into 5 days with a minimal amount spent. This gives you extra time to validate your ideas and improve if there any changes to be made in case of failure.
- Design Sprints are also very useful for affordable web design services because they do away with the expenditure needed in long-term prototyping.
Challenges of Design Prints
- One of the main challenges of Design Prints is to gather a group of individuals that correlate to your work. Getting people to cancel any plans they have for the week is arduous and finding the right week when everyone is free is even harder.
- Managing projects and time constraints is not an easy balance. It gets too complex and head-wrecking to execute projects under pressure. For example, affordable custom website design services might find it difficult to operate on such a short timescale.
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Reference Links:
https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/design-sprint
https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-running-design-sprints
Picture Courtesy: Google Ventures
