Hala 🤩 !

Here is the Part 2 of this serious which I’ll talk about Design Sprint Foundation – The Udacity nano Degree. You can View the Previous Part:

Design Sprint Foundation P1 – Intro

Through this article we gonna talk about the Day No.1 – Activities, what we gonna do and deliverables in details, so let’s begin.

Module 1 Is All About Defining The Challenge We Want To Work On For The Rest Of The Sprint. It Consists Of Three Main Exercises:

Expert interviews – Time: 30 minutes
Setting The Long-Term Goal & Sprint Questions
Creation Of The Map And Target

The First Part Of The Expert Interviews Exercise Is All About Letting Experts Speak About The Problems Within Their Team. And The Experts Are Simply Someone Chosen On The Sprint Team To Be The Person Who Wants To Talk About The Problems While The Rest Of The Team Writes Notes About The Problems.

But They Don’t Just Write Any Notes. They Write Their Notes In A Very Specific Way. And The Way That Works Is That They’re Going To Be Writing Their Notes Using The “How Might We…?” Method.

The “How Might We…?” Method Is Relatively Simple. All You Need Is A Post-It, A Block Of Post-Its, And A Sharpie. And While You’re Listening To The Person Monologuing And Talking About The Challenges Within Their Company, You’re Going To Be Taking Notes Like This. You’re Going To Be Writing “H”, “M”, “W” Which Stands For “How Might We…?” And Then You’re Going To Be Writing The Challenge In A Relatively Open Way That Doesn’t Focus On A Solution.

People Now Are Ready Enough To Stand And Post Notes On The Wall, Make Sure That They Do That Themselves And Discussions Are Totally Not Accepted At This Point. Then You Will Have To Make Groups For This Notes, You Don’t Have To Make It Professional, You & Your Team Should Define Super Fast Groups For Cards, And Move On To Arrange All The Cards Under This Groups. While You Are Preparing Your Card.

I Think It’s Great To Think About Groups Like “Marketing, Product, Business, Engagement”.

Now Give Your Team 2 Voting Dots, They Will Post The Dots On Cards “WMW” Notes Which They Think We Should Solve This Week, There Are No Roles Fro Voting, Team Members Can Vote On Any Card, One Card May Have Multiple Votes, And My Any Team Member Post His Own Two Dots On The Same Card, Can Vote For Any Of His Ideas, Or Others Ideas – The Ultimate Goal Here Is To Move Forward And It Should Not Take More Than 7 Min.

Now You Will Prioritize The Cards Based On Votes – You Can Ignore Posts With Less Than 3 Dots, It Will Be Arranged On A List, And That Will Make The Ideas Moves Between People On The Same Room Without Any Discussions, And It Will Reflect The Next Step.

It’s time to create the Long Term goal for The Project, and the process is relatively simple, The Exercise Time is 5 minutes Max.

Team members take a rectangle sticky note and a sharpie, and they’re gonna write from their perspective what the project/ product looks like 2 years from now in the most optimistic way possible. So this means everything works out in the sprint, all of the challenges that we want to attack are solved.

For Example:

The best laundry service in the world
The most used laundry service in the world
The replacement for washing machines

Without discussing, everybody writes their own version of what they consider the goal to be, including the Decider. Once the 5 minutes is up, the Moderator is going to have each team member read out their long-term goal. Once each has been read, the Decider is going to choose what the real long-term goal will be for the team.

To do this, they can choose which one they like the best, or they can work with the Moderator to combine a couple of the suggestions to create the ultimate long-term goal.

Generally, the point in this step is not to open up into a discussion, and rather let the Decider make the decision on what the core long-term goal should be.

Exercise Time: 5 minutes

Now it’s your turn to create three Sprint Questions that outline the main challenges or blockers for the project long-term goal.

Keep track of these questions as you will need them for your project. You can initially use red, square sticky notes and then transfer your notes to the quizzes here.

Be sure to use a timer so that you don’t spend too much time on this exercise.

Be sure to phrase your question using the “Can We…?” format so that the question is answerable with a Yes or No.

Typically each team member would create these questions and do a similar voting process as the HMWs. In this case, we will just have you write 3 of your own and keep those for this course.

The map is essentially a user journey for the entire system of the product. Since you don’t have a lot of insight into the product, you are welcome to make some basic assumptions based on companies that you are familiar with, such as any of direct competitors or your previous experiences.

It’s good to start by placing the actors that are important on the left-hand side of the map. And then place the user end goal on the far right. Try to focus on key points of interaction with the user.

Your task as The Decider for this step is to identify the target area for project Design Sprint.

Module 2

Module two is all about creating solutions for the challenges that we created in module one. Module one was all about setting a foundation, and now module two is all about building upon it and working to create as many solutions as possible.
At the end of module two, they’re going to be pushing forward as their suggestion for the test. each team member is going to be finishing up one concept that Module two contains two key exercises.

Lightning demos, where each team member is going to be searching for inspiration for the problem that they are going to be trying to solve and then sharing it with the rest of the group.
Four parts sketching which is all about ramping the team members up to creating the final concept so that they don’t start with a blank piece of paper. They have a step by step process to get there.

Lightning Demos

This doesn’t mean that team members from Laundry.io need to find other laundry examples. They can find examples from anywhere and pull inspiration from anything that they find.

So for example, maybe one of the team members is interested in showing a specific interface paradigm within an app like Airbnb. Maybe it’s something completely different, maybe the industry has nothing to do with each other.

The point here is that each team member looks for three pieces of inspiration that they want to show the rest of the team and writes down what the key point that they want to talk about is on a post-it so that they’re not rambling.

Each team member has 15 minutes to search for three pieces of inspiration, and then, one by one, the team members present what they found. While the team members are presenting their ideas, one team member will be given the task to write down the key ideas of each piece of inspiration, so the team members can refer to it later.

Four Parts Sketching

Four-part sketching consists of, you guessed it, four parts.

Note taking
sketching
crazy 8’s
a final concept.

The entire process is all about getting you from a blank page to a concept you are proud of pushing forward as your bet for what should be prototyped and tested this week.

Note Taking :

The first part of four-part sketching is called notes, and it’s very very simple. The team members are going to be given a clipboard, a sharpie, and some A4 paper, and all they’re going to do for the next 20 minutes is note down the different artifacts that they’ve collected throughout the day.

So, they’re going to walk around the room, they’re going to note down the long-term goal, the sprint questions, the pieces of information and inspiration that came out of the lightning demos, maybe sketch little bits of the map, and all they’re doing right now is being a copier.

They’re just copying down what they see around them.But as they start to copy things down, they’ll start to come up with small inklings of ideas. So they just keep writing for the full 20 minutes, writing ideas, anything that comes to their mind, they’re not going to be sharing this with each other.

This is completely internal for them to just think and write down the things that they’re seeing. That is the note-taking exercise.
don’t worry if nothing exciting or creative is coming to you at this point in the process. Remember what both Jonathan and Jake said at the very beginning of the process. Sometimes you’ll feel uncertain, awkward, or just not sure you’re getting anywhere. Don’t worry! Just trust the process and you’ll be surprised with your results.

Sketching:

Now is the time to take your notes and start scribbling down some ideas that you might have from what you wrote. The main purpose is to start getting comfortable with drawing, so don’t feel like you need to come up with any solutions just yet.

Try to get used to the feeling of drawing out your ideas. If you have absolutely nothing in mind, you can draw random things for the 20 minutes. In a team setting, these sketches are not shared, so don’t worry about what others might think of your drawing skills.

If you can remember back to maybe when you were in grade school and you used to doodle on your notebooks (or maybe you still do that!) — try to put yourself in that headspace. Just let all of that judgment and perfection fade away as you sketch out whatever random ideas you have for the 20 minutes.

Crazy 8s:

whatever random ideas you have for the 20 minutes.

Sketching the concept:

it’s nothing scary, it’s essentially a three-part almost like comic strip where each team member tries to explain what solution they want to put forward.As you can see here it’s nothing special. It doesn’t look beautiful, it doesn’t need to. But what it does need to be is self-explanatory because team members will not be allowed to explain their own concepts.On day two, the concepts will be revealed to the rest of the team.But the moderator will be reading each concept out to the rest of the team, not the person who drew it. So now the team members have 45 minutes to go through their notes to remind themselves of their long-term goal, to remind themselves of the Sprint questions, to look at the map and focus on where it’s targeted. And, finally put together a three-part concept.

The posts that’s here, imagine them as what you would say if you were trying to explain your concept. Do try to make it as visual as possible, do try to make it as clear as possible. But don’t worry about making it look beautiful. The final thing I’ll say about the concept is that the team members will not be presenting their own concepts, so the concepts need to be very self-explanatory.

The Post-it’s here, you can imagine this entire thing is like a three slide powerpoint or keynote and the Post-it are almost like the things that the team members would want to say if they were allowed to present it. Keeping things anonymous and not allowing the team members to present what they have, reduces the bias for someone who is very good at giving sales pitches. And that’s a big theme within the design Sprint, is not allowing personal bias to kind of decide what solutions are chosen. Of course, in the end, the decider is going to choose which direction everybody goes in.

But until that point, it’s a very anonymous process, very silent and very controlled. Now, doing these concepts alone is a great way for people to really be able to think about what sort of solution they want to put forward. But this shouldn’t worry that their entire concept is just going to end up being the final thing that’s going to get tested. On day two, we’re going to be able to combine things or kind of take bits and pieces of what pieces we like. So, next 45 minutes, the team is going to work together but alone without discussion on creating the final concept for day one.

And it’s the end of Day1, and our Article also. if you have any questions feel free to share it with me. and I hope if you have a good time not only to read this article but also to implement it!

Remember, The Design Sprint Kit site by Google – is here for help also.

Salamat 😊

Design Sprint Foundation P2 – Day one