Mobile UX Marathon: Design Sprints

Hello and welcome to the Mobile UX Marathon—a series of weekly webinars on improving user experience and conversion rates on mobile web. Today’s webinar is about design sprints.

Please share your questions on the UX Marathon website, and later, join the live stream for answers. You’ll also find more information about upcoming live streams, resources, and presentation decks on the website. The link is in the video description.

Before we begin, I’m Emily Ferdinandi, a Mobile UX Specialist at Google. I’ve been leading design sprints here for two years, and I’m excited to share my insights.

Today, we’ll cover three key topics: sprint methodology, the sprint mindset, and applying sprint methods to web optimization. Join us on the live stream on May 21st for design sprint case studies and a Q&A session.

Starting with sprint methodology—what is a design sprint? It’s a framework for solving critical business questions through design, prototyping, and user testing. We use a “converge and diverge” mindset: first, gathering all possible information through lightning talks and expert ideation, then making decisions. We sketch out multiple solutions, decide again, and move through the stages of understanding, sketching, deciding, prototyping, and validating.

A design sprint isn’t a UX review, a brainstorm, a place to complain, an extended meeting, or a time to close down ideas. It’s about ideation, exploring possibilities, and bringing ideas to life.

For an effective sprint, you need the right team:

• The Decider: typically an SVP or VP, who makes the final decision.
• The Business Expert: someone who knows the product or market, like a product owner or marketer.
• The Creator: a designer or UX engineer who designs the prototype.
• The Builder: a technical expert who assesses feasibility and eventually develops the final product.
• (Optional) The Customer Expert: someone with deep consumer insights, like a sales representative.

Finally, you’ll need a Sprint Master or facilitator to guide the process.

The Google Ventures Design Sprint typically follows a five-day process.

Monday: This is a divergent moment where you unpack everything you know about the product and what you're sprinting on. You’ll also plan five user interviews to gather additional insights beyond what your sprint team already knows. This could involve bringing in experts from your team—your goal is to collect as much information as possible.

Tuesday: You'll start sketching your ideas, focusing on detailed solutions using low-fidelity prototypes. Paper is key here; it's all about getting the ideas out without worrying about perfection.

Wednesday: This is the decision phase. With many solutions in front of you, the team will narrow down the options to the best and most feasible idea to move forward with.

Thursday: This is when you become incredibly productive. You’ll spend hours prototyping in tools like Sketch or InDesign, working on what the prototype will look like and when it could be ready for the market.

Friday: This day is dedicated to testing. You'll present the prototype to real customers in one-on-one interviews, gathering feedback and assessing your work.

If you don't have five days for a full sprint, that’s okay—there are shorter options. If you have one to two days, focus on sprinting a single feature or component, understanding that the deliverables will be lower fidelity. In two to three days, you can tackle a set of features and possibly two user flows. Within four to five days, you can rethink an entire experience and create a full product vision.

Potential Challenges:

1. High Workload: As the facilitator or Sprint Master, plan for five to ten hours of prep work before the sprint and one to five days of sprinting, depending on the scope.
2. Getting the Right People: It’s essential to have all key players in the room, but convincing busy people unfamiliar with sprints to participate can be a challenge.
3. Time Commitment: People often struggle to commit to one project for several days. You’ll need to make a strong case for blocking their time.
4. Short-Term Thinking: Teams may be focused on the current quarter and reluctant to think long-term. It’s important to emphasise future improvements.
5. Sprint Resistance: If someone has had a negative experience with a sprint before, you may need to convince them of its value.

Sprint Mindset: A great design sprint hinges on a few key factors:

1. Stakeholder Buy-In: Ensure all the right people are committed and present.
2. Well-Defined Goals: Enter the sprint with a clear objective. You may not know how to achieve it yet, but you should know what you're aiming for.
3. Tight Management: Whether the sprint is one day or five, there’s a lot of information and activity to manage. It’s the Sprint Master's job to keep everyone on track, on time, and energised .

Last but not least is the importance of clear follow-up. After dedicating one to five days (or more) to a sprint, it's crucial to ensure that the outcomes are actually implemented. Significant follow-up is necessary to make sure that all the ideas generated during the sprint come to fruition.

Let’s discuss the exercises associated with each sprint phase:

1. Understand: This is the ideation and inspiration phase. It often includes lightning talks on topics that will inspire and educate the team. You can discuss business goals, address technology constraints upfront, conduct user interviews, and create a stakeholder map to identify key influencers needed to bring your ideas to life. You might also conduct a competitive analysis to see who’s excelling in the space and where you can draw inspiration. Lastly, there's an exercise called "How Might We," which we’ll cover in more detail later.
2. Define: Here, you’ll map out the user journey, consider user needs, define success metrics, and perhaps develop an experience strategy or executive summary.
3. Sketch: This is where divergence begins. You’ll start sketching ideas on paper—low-fidelity is key here. Exercises like "Crazy Eights" and storyboarding help bring your ideas to life.
4. Decide: Decision-making happens throughout the sprint as you move between divergence and convergence. Techniques like Zen voting and decision sliders help narrow down the choices. Stickers are often used to vote and prioritise ideas.
5. Prototype: You’ll create a physical or digital prototype, such as a poster, a mock-up of a future website, or a user flow using design tools like Sketch or InDesign.
6. Validate: This phase involves testing your prototype with either internal team members or external users to gather feedback and ensure the prototype meets the goals set at the beginning.

In-Depth Look at Key Activities:

• How Might We: The goal of the "How Might We" exercise is to frame ideas in an open-ended and optimistic way, focusing on opportunities and challenges rather than getting bogged down by problems or jumping to solutions too soon. You’ll grab a marker—preferably one with a broad tip—and write down ideas as questions that start with "How might we." For example, "How might we reduce the signup process on our website from four pages to two?" By the end of this phase, you should have numerous sticky notes filled with ideas to consider in the next stages.
• User Journey Mapping: The objective here is to walk through the user experience from your customer’s perspective, identifying strengths, weaknesses, pain points, and areas for improvement. You’ll compare these findings with the "How Might We" notes and start grouping them to create high-level ideas that will guide the rest of the sprint.
• Crazy Eights: This sketching exercise helps get all ideas out on paper quickly. Everyone can participate, regardless of drawing skill. The goal is to use this fast-paced method to focus and explore individual ideas before narrowing them down. You’ll take an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, fold it into eight rectangles (about the size of a mobile phone), and spend one minute sketching an idea in each rectangle. Aim for eight different ideas, not variations of the same one. The focus here is on quantity over quality. You don't have to worry about making them pretty or perfect; they're just for you. The point of having eight sketches is to push past your initial ideas. Usually, you'll breeze through one, two, or three quickly, but by the time you get to four, five, six, seven, and eight, it becomes more challenging. This forces you to think outside the box and explore new ideas.

Next, we have the solution sketch. After completing the Crazy Eights exercise, you'll go through a process of sharing and voting. Then, you'll add more detail to the winning ideas. Each person will select the best idea from the Crazy Eights and sketch out multiple states of that idea to clarify it further. You can include words in the sketch to better communicate your concept and add a title for easy reference throughout the rest of the day. Throughout this process, there will be voting and sharing. Typically, each person has about three minutes to share their solution, and then everyone can vote—usually about two votes per person. You can vote for the same idea twice, your own idea, or someone else's. At the end of the voting, you'll review where most of the sticky dots are, and those are the ideas you'll work on for prototyping in the afternoon. The goal is to reach a consensus quickly on the most important solutions to pursue.

Finally, I want to discuss how you can apply these sprint methods to your website optimization. Often, your sprint will focus on one of three main performance pillars: attention (the landing page or main page your audience visits), navigation (how they move from the main page to the detail or category pages), and checkout flow (the action you want them to take). This might involve ensuring that when someone lands on your site, the calls to action and value proposition are clear, and the website's look and feel are coherent and easy to navigate. For navigation, think about how users explore your site, moving from point A to point B easily. Lastly, consider the checkout flow: if you're focused on lead generation, is the flow optimised for seamless keyboard entry and other factors that make it easy for users to complete the checkout process? Improving any of these three performance pillars can significantly increase conversion rates.

Here are some statistics to consider: 61% of users expect brands to tailor their experiences based on preferences. Almost 50% prefer to use their smartphone throughout the entire purchase process, not just during the research phase. Nearly 30% of cart abandonments are due to long and complicated checkout processes. This means that improving your mobile website, whether it's the initial landing experience, the navigation, or the final conversion, can significantly impact your bottom line and conversion rate.

That's all we have for you today. I want to leave you with a few resources if you're interested in learning more about design sprints. You can check out the Google Ventures design sprint materials at jvcom/sprint. They offer design sprint kits on the Think with Google site, allowing you to run a design sprint on your own if you're interested. You can also watch some recommended videos on YouTube, which we've listed here, and read the book, which is excellent and covers everything we discussed in more detail.

Please join us for the livestream on May 21st. Make sure to submit your questions online so we can answer them during the livestream. We'll also share new case studies from people who have run design sprints and the impact these sprints had on their business.

Thank you very much for your time, and enjoy the rest of the Mobile UX Marathon!

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