Week 3 of the Google’s Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design is behind me. In this week we covered the Design sprint – an intense 5-day process where user-centered teams tackle design problems. Working with expert insights, teams ideate and test solutions on selected users in a short time span.
Five phases of the design sprint process
The design sprint process consisting of five phases was devised by Jake Knapp, former Google ventures design partner, in 2010.
The following steps allow you to map out challenges, explore solutions and pick the best ones in just five days:
1. Understand
Understand your users and articulate the problem you’re trying to solve
2. Ideate
Brainstorm different solutions
3. Decide
Decide on one approach and solution to the problem you are trying to solve
4. Prototype
Create a realistic prototype
5. Test
Test the prototype and get feedback from the users
Self-Reflection: Identify the benefits of design sprints
One of the practice quizzes asked students to do a self-reflection and think about how a design sprint would help a new designer, what phase are we most interested in participating in, and why. This was my response for which I got the highest, 100% score:
A design sprint is an efficient, time-effective way to quickly come up with new ideas and solutions to problems I come across. It will help me think deeper than the surface level and also give insight into the thought processes, perspectives, and knowledge of other team members.
I am most interested in the Understanding phase as the best solution I can come up with greately depends on how well I understand the problem and know users. The Ideate phase is also a phase I am very interested as I love coming up with solutions to problems. It is exciting working with a team and then possibly combining two or three solutions into one, resulting in a superior product or user experience. Prototyping is an interesting phase too where I can learn how something is built and how it works.