Google’s ‘Design Sprint’

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Google's Design Sprint is a five-phase framework that helps answer critical business questions through rapid prototyping and user testing. Sprints let your team reach clearly defined goals and deliverables and gain key learnings, quickly. The process helps to spark innovation, encourage user-centered thinking, align your team under a shared vision, and get you to product launch faster.

The five phases of a Google Design Sprint are:

  1. Understand: Map out the problem and ensure that everyone is clear on the process.
  2. Sketch: Each participant sketches out possible solutions. These sketches are then voted on by the group.
  3. Decide: Choose the best sketches and turn them into a testable hypothesis.
  4. Prototype: Build a high-quality prototype. The goal of this step is to understand the look of the solution.
  5. Test: Collect data by testing the prototype within your target audience.

This process encourages swift ideation and validation with users, ensuring that resources are effectively utilised and that the team does not go down the wrong path for a prolonged period. This method is all about validating ideas and assumptions as quickly as possible.

<aside> ⭐ REFLECTION: A ‘Design Sprint’ is something that I had heard about many times but never fully grasped what they were. I actually thought it just meant everyone had to design something as quick as they could. This is a concept I wish I had known about sooner as it is a great frame to structure your design projects within, perhaps not only spending a day on each in a university context however. I definitely will consider this in my own design practice more deeply.

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Class Task: Complete Stage 1-3 of a Design Sprint

The Brief

In our groups, we were asked to complete stages 1-3 of a design sprint surrounding the current A&E crisis in Northern Ireland. We had to do all of these stages within a day, rather than a day each as supposed to be allotted, however we still had a strong outcome.

Stage 1: Understand

To begin, we looked at various articles surrounding the topic locally. We found great inspiration from the following article:

The patient’s path in the Emergency Department

And mainly the graphic below: