Design Sprints

Launching new digital products or refreshing existing ones is a huge undertaking. And all too often, the speed of innovation is reduced as a result of internal debate or competing priorities, making it impossible to move ideas forward. That’s where design sprints come in, enabling you to progress from problem to tested solution in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months. 

What is a design sprint?

Built upon the methodology first introduced by Google Ventures, the design sprint is a process to validate your product vision before committing development resources. 

It involves forming a small team to follow a five-phase process over a series of days. By answering critical business questions about your product through design, prototyping and testing, you will progress from problem to tested solution using a proven methodology during the allocated time; allowing you to take a peek into the future to see how customers react to your product before investing time and resources into building the full solution. 

Design sprints give you the competitive advantage of moving forward more quickly, with more clarity, by building a realistic prototype without any engineering code. This allows you to compress a process that typically takes months, into just a few days.

Expert design sprint agency

A typical design sprint follows a five-day process, which DEPT has fully integrated into its workflow. We extended it further after seeing evidence of how longer sprints can benefit clients, especially during the kick-off phase of a new collaboration. 

At DEPT®, a typical design sprint process looks like this: 

01 Scoping 
In this phase, we map the problem faced, define expectations, and generate the questions to be answered during the sprint. We then create a user journey detailing how the product will potentially be used. 

02 Sketching 
We compile project inspiration and references before sketching possible solutions to the problem. This sees all team members crafting potential solutions, allowing all voices and ideas to dominate the sprint.

03 Decision
At the decision stage, the sketches are reviewed and the team decides what the best possible solutions are, and which will be used to inform the creation of storyboards. 

04 Protype
The prototype phase sees the storyboard beginning to come to life, building a prototype product in order to gain all-important feedback for testing.

05 Testing
During testing, the prototype is validated through usability testing with real customers to gather feedback and questions. After the entire design team has watched the interview process, they start defining next steps. 

Working with DEPT®

DEPT® has used design sprints to drive results for a range of global brands. Our digital experts have built on this methodology further, learning how to make sprints flexible enough to meet the changing goals of clients in various industries.

When partnering with Indigo AG, the DEPT team was able to challenge initial assumptions about the company’s minimum viable product, in favour of a more effective process. This allowed them to build an app that serves a broader range of users, who wouldn’t have been served by the app in its first incarnation.

Design sprints at DEPT® are ambitious, exciting and highly effective, uniting the expertise of specialists from across numerous departments. They allow us to be fully aligned with your vision, build a product that addresses your most valuable questions around customer needs.

Get in touch today to find out how DEPT® design sprints can help bring your digital products to life.