You may have heard about Design Sprint by now. It’s a methodology being used by a wide variety of different businesses and corporations when they are trying to solve a problem, expand their customer base, or simply innovate. The beauty of this approach is how streamlined the whole process is, lasting only five days from start to finish. We’ll give you a quick summary of what the Design Sprint is, with a focus on Design Sprint user testing, a critical step in the timeline. 

Design Sprint 101

We’ve discussed what a Design Sprint is before. Basically, it was invented by Jake Knapp and Google Ventures in order to completely authenticate ideas in only five days. This is vital, as we’ve all likely witnessed first-hand how long the process can take from the initial spark of an idea, to actually creating and testing the idea. Then, unfortunately, these ideas sometimes don’t work, effectively wasting any time you spent. The Design Sprint won’t leave a company with a completed product, of course, but it will validate the initial idea. You can then move on to bring the idea to market from there. The process starts with mapping, moves to sketching, to deciding, then to prototyping, and finally testing. This is all done in five days. In this article, we will focus on Design Sprint user testing, which occurs on day five. 

For more information on all of the steps of the Design Sprint see here.

What is User Testing?

Let’s pretend you started your Design Sprint on a Monday. On Thursday you’ll be making a prototype of your initial design. This will not be the finished product, but a realistic idea of your design. On Friday your product will be ready to be presented to users. This is the user testing step of your Design Sprint. You will have a prepared idea to present this day, ensuring the users are given a prototype as close as possible to what you want to eventually create. You’ll also be prepared with a way to gauge their reaction, interest, and overall thoughts about your prototype. Pay attention to any problems they have, or if they are unsure about certain functions. Here’s how to prepare for your Design Sprint user testing. 

Design Sprint User Testing Audience

When you come up with your initial idea, it is critical to consider the audience you’re targeting. Who will be interested in your product? This should be thought about and solidified before you actually start the Design Sprint process. Once you know who this product will be marketed to, you’re ready to recruit your audience. A great step is for your team to create a screener questionnaire. This will help you acquire the type of audience you need for the user test. The type of questions you ask will depend entirely on your product. If your product is a book app for horror stories, for instance, you don’t want to recruit people who don’t read. You also don’t want to recruit people who like the exact same type of book, however, as you want your product to appeal to the widest audience it can. Once you create your questionnaire and a form that people can fill out, you’re ready to post it. 

Finding Your Audience

Where you post your form also entirely depends on your product. Given the book example, it might be a good idea to post about your study on social media, using hashtags to reach a community of readers. If you want your participants to be somewhat random, you might consider posting on an online forum. If you want experts on a certain product, you will have to reach a bit wider and farther. Think about professional contacts, past clients, networks, anywhere you feel might reach the audience you’re hoping for. You also might want to consider offering an incentive for participants, as it can sometimes be difficult to find an audience for your Design Spring user test. 

Your Interview Guide

Now it’s time to select your audience and finalize your interview. Create a spreadsheet and select the participants for your interview. Contact them and schedule their test. You should also have a non-disclosure agreement ready for them to sign before their testing day. This can easily be created in DocuSign. Then, create your interview guide. Think about how you want your users to interact with the product, how long each task might take, and what you want them to walk away with. A good blueprint to follow is providing an introduction, context questions, follow-up questions, and a debrief. Another tip to keep in mind is to start broad, and then move on to more specific questions. 

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Design Sprint User Testing Day

Make sure you set up your room, either in-person or virtually, before your audience arrives, ensuring they will be comfortable. If you’re recording the user testing, make sure everything is working accurately and test your prototypes for everything you’re wanting them to accomplish during the test. If you have the time, conduct a test run of how you want the interview process to go. Basically, make sure you’re completely ready before any of your participants arrive. Your team should also be watching the interview process.

For a Design Sprint user test to go as smoothly as possible, make sure you show no bias. Be friendly. Ask follow-up questions. Pay close attention to the time and to nonverbal clues from your participants. Then, show appreciation for the time they spent trying out your product. Now that you’ve completed your user test, analyze the results and determine the next step. Was it a success? Do you have any problems to fix? You’ve completed your user test!

The Design Sprint is a streamlined, effective way to completely authenticate an idea in only five days. The user test is an extremely important component of the whole process, one that has to be prepared adequately in order to be successful. If you’ve recently found your company in a rut, failing to come up with unique ideas, and holding ineffective meetings with frustrating outcomes, Voltage Control can help. We believe in ridding the world of bad meetings, replacing them with productive and inspiring workshops that will lead to creation and innovation. If you’re interested in conducting a Design Sprint, we can guide your team and illuminate the path. Contact us today if you have any questions. We want to help you bring your biggest and boldest ideas to fruition. 

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Often, when words and ideas become ubiquitous — “disrupt,” “unicorn,” and “curate” are some potentially over-used words in the start-up and design space — we begin not to listen. We start to tune out. We identify these hot words as meaningless buzzwords.

But, that’s not always the case. It’s not all hot air. So, if you’ve heard the phrase human-centered design (pretty much synonymous with user-centered design) lately in the news or from colleagues or friends, try not to tune out. It’s worth it to stop, listen, and find out more.

The ideas, concepts, and processes behind human-centered design have been at work for decades. If you are curious about what human-centered design is and why it still matters today, read on.

Here are the four reasons we believe human-centered design is hyper-relevant today.

1. Human-Centered Design is Empathy-Based

There’s been a lot of discussions recently about how people don’t seem empathetic enough, especially in a world of nasty Twitter wars and divided political agendas. Most of us can agree that we need empathy more than ever.

We need to see the world from other people’s perspectives, which is what empathy is all about. (To be clear, empathy is not the same as sympathy, which is feeling sorry for someone. Psychiatrist and researcher Helen Riess describes empathy in the book The Empathy Effect like this: “We must understand the situation from the other person’s physical, psychological, social, and spiritual perspectives.”)

Human-centered design begins and ends with people.

What does empathy have to do with human-centered design? It’s right there in words themselves. Human-centered design begins and ends with people. It’s a process that is dedicated to creating products, processes, or experiences that are crafted from the perspective of the end-user.

Usually, this takes the form of starting any project or initiative with a deep dive into your users’ lives; typically, human-centered designers conduct user interviews to understand the perspective and needs of the people they’re designing for.

“While people are generally pretty well-attuned to their own feelings and emotions, getting into someone else’s head can be a bit more difficult. The ability to feel empathy allows people to “walk a mile in another’s shoes,” so to speak. It permits people to understand the emotions that others are feeling.” — from the article “What is Empathy?”

2. Human-Centered Design Embraces a Learner Mindset

Another essential thing about human-centered design, which is also related to empathy, is that it encourages people to embrace a “learner mindset” versus a fixed mindset. In the article“The Importance of Human-centered Design in Product Design,” Miklos Philips says: “Central to the human-centered design approach is the adoption of a learner mindset; a learner is optimistic and seeks understanding as a way to guide their actions.”

“Central to the human-centered design approach is the adoption of a learner mindset.” — Miklos Philip

When you come to a business or design challenge with a learner mindset, you are open to discovering new things, challenging biases, and thinking differently. This is in opposition to a judgmental mindset that immediately tries to categorize or place blame.

The article “7 Ways to Develop a Learner Mindset at Work” puts it this way: “Psychologists suggest that there are two ways of responding to any situation — judging and learning. If you have a judgmental mindset, you tend to want control over situations and focus your energy towards placing responsibility on someone else. The learner, on the other hand, tends to observe situations in order to fully understand them, reserving judgment for later.”

When you come to a business or design challenge with a learner mindset, you are open to discovering new things, challenging biases, and thinking differently.

Human-centered design, based on building empathy through talking and listening to users, is focused on identifying solutions through an open, non-judgemental approach. It’s rooted in a belief that this learner mindset will propel you to better, more innovative solutions.

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3. Human-Centered Design Helps You Get It Right More Often

As mentioned above, an essential component of human-centered design is user testing. This means not only talking to customers at the beginning of a project but also engaging with your users to test ideas throughout the whole process.

The reason for user testing is this: we shouldn’t assume anything about how people will perceive our designs, or what they will like or dislike. A team engaged in a human-centered design process would talk to users early and often, to get their feedback on any designs or ideas. With this invaluable information in hand, teams can quickly iterate and get new ideas or products out in the world in a way that works for the end-user.

The article “A Comprehensive Guide To User Testing” explains why user testing so critical. Namely, it helps you pinpoint issues and respond before sinking design and development costs into your solution:“[User testing] helps you to identify any design issues before you get to the expensive part of the process when you reach the final build. It’s too late — and too expensive — to leave user testing until after you’ve built your product. At that point in the process, changes are incredibly costly.”

4. Human-Centered Design Drives True ROI

When companies and teams apply human-centered design, it’s not just because it’s a better way to work. Human-centered ways of working lead to better business outcomes, as well. Usability.gov cites these fascinating stats: “Dr. Susan Weinschenk notes that of those IT investments, up to 15% of IT projects are abandoned, and at least 50% of a programmers’ time during the project is spent doing rework that is avoidable. Following UCD best practices, helps to identify challenges upfront so that a solution can be found early.”

Additionally, the article “How To Calculate The ROI Of Your UX Activities” gives some real-life examples of companies who found incredible business returns from human-centered design activities: “For instance, Walmart’s redesign of its e-commerce site resulted in a 214% increase in visitors. Bank of America increased its online banking registration by 45% after a UX redesign of the process. IBM’s report on User-Centered Design notes that “every dollar invested in ease of use returns $10 to $100.”

Do you want to learn more about human-centered design?

These are the four reasons we think human-centered design is as relevant and compelling today as it’s ever been. If you’re curious to learn more or apply human-centered design to your work, get in touch.

Voltage Control facilitates design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out at hello@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

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The phrase “user interviews” may sound serious, but it’s a very simple concept. In short, user interviews are simply structured conversations with the target users of your product, service, or experience. User interviews are closely related to the design thinking methodology, which puts the user (or customer) at the heart of the decision-making or design process.

The purpose of user interviews is to understand more about the people you want to serve through your product. Through your interviews, you aim to understand their pain points, hopes, and needs. All of this information helps you design more relevant, meaningful, and desirable experiences.

In the past, it was commonplace for many companies to design products or experiences without this critical perspective. Instead, decisions were based on gut reactions or the business bottom line above all else—What does our internal team think we need? What is our boss telling us to do? Or, what can we do quickly?

None of these approaches starts with the most important person—the end-user. The design thinking mindset encourages everyone involved with creating something— whether that “something” is an app, a retail experience, an online service, or a medication—to approach their work first from a place of empathy. And one of the quickest, most effective ways to gain empathy is through user interviews.

When is it a good time for user interviews?

User interviews are conducted throughout all stages of a design project or initiative. However, the goals behind your research and the type of questions you ask will shift depending on where you’re at in your work and what you want to accomplish.

Here are a few examples of when to conduct user interviews:

• At the beginning of a project: When you first kick off an initiative, it’s definitely time to host user interviews with a representative group of customers. During this phase, the goal of your user interviews is usually very generative and open. You want to understand your product or problem space from the users’ perspective.
• In the middle of a project: A project’s mid-point is also a great time for user interviews. At this point, you hopefully have some concepts (even just sketches or basic wireframes) or prototypes to show your users. The goal of the user interviews here is to ask questions that will help you refine your ideas to align with what the customer/user wants and to understand if you’re going in the right direction.
• When you’ve launched something: User interviews don’t stop once you’ve produced an experience and put it out into the market. In fact, your user interviews might become more important now. At this point, user interviews help you perfect and refine your existing product and test out new or future features.
• During a Design Sprint: At Voltage Control, we are experts in facilitating the five-day Design Sprint method. This a one-week process, originally developed at Google Ventures, leads a team through a collaborative set of activities to create a solution to an existing business problem. In five short days, you do research, insight gathering, concepting, and prototyping. On the Friday of a Design Sprint, you typically interview five users to get their feedback on your rapid prototype.

What are the benefits of user interviews?

1. Get learnings before it’s too late

When you don’t conduct user interviews and you jump right into designing solutions, you might head off in the wrong direction. This can be a costly mistake. Talking to users upfront helps point you in the right direction and focuses your efforts on solutions that you have a strong hunch will be useful to your customers or end-users.

2. It only takes a handful

User interviews don’t have to be a lengthy, time-consuming part of your design process. You can gather such rich information in a few days or a week of interviews. You don’t need to interview 20 or 100 people. Interview 5–10 people with different perspectives, ages, and backgrounds. You’ll start to hear common themes and issues from this small subset of users.

3. Get out of your routine (and the office)

Another benefit of user interviews is that they shake up your typical modes of working—meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Talking with your users is incredibly inspiring and can reenergize teams. It’s even better if you can interview people outside of the office and in their homes or another neutral setting.

4. Back up your ideas with stories

A final benefit of user interviews is that they provide stories, quotes, and narratives that you can use to back up your ideas when you are trying to “sell” a feature or experience. When you can tell your colleagues that you created something specifically because a user showed a need for it, your ideas will have more power and weight.

How do you structure a user interview?

Before you hold a user interview, you’ll have to write an interview guide or protocol. This is the list of questions and topics you want to cover in your conversation. Be sure to think carefully about how you want to open and close your conversation, as well as the topics you need to hit in the time you have with your participant. (Typically, interviews are somewhere between 30–90 minutes long.)

In the Design Sprint, we follow something called the “5 Act Interview” when we talk to people about the prototype. It’s a basic interview structure that covers all the essentials and can be easily adapted or tweaked if you are doing another type of research. If you want to learn more about the 5 Act interview, I’ve outlined it in this article.

If you’re running interviews as part of a Design Sprint, and even if you’re not, we designed a scorecard that helps you take interview notes and synthesize the findings coming out of user research.

How do I find participants for user interviews?

When you’ve been sold on the need for, and benefits of, user research and you’ve done some preparation, it’s time to find and schedule your interview participants.

There are many ways to find participants for user interviews, some more formal than others.

Option 1: Friends and Family
Write up a simple description of the type of people you’re looking for (i.e. millennials who don’t have smartphones) and then send emails out to people you know and/or post your request on your social media feed. Consider creating a simple survey through something like Google Forms, Survey Monkey, or TypeForm to make sure that people have the qualities and background you’re looking for.

Option 2: Recruiting Companies: 
If you need more help or if your users are very niche and/or hard to find, you can also consider hiring professional recruiting agencies to find and schedule your interviewees. There are many companies out there, both old and new, local and national, but we’d recommend checking out dScout and Respondent.

Do you want expert help with user interviews, innovation workshops, or a Design Sprint? Let’s talk.

Voltage Control facilitates events of all kinds, including design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out to us at info@voltagecontrol.co for a consultation.

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If you work in e-commerce, product, or digital design, you might have come across the concept of the “painted door” test. It’s one way that teams assess whether their users might like a new concept, feature, or business model, but without the cost and time of building the entire thing. As David DeFranza succinctly puts it: “The idea is simple: Instead of building a complete solution or feature, you build the suggestion of such a feature and measure how many people try to utilize it.”

Here’s an example of how it might work. Let’s say you work for a rideshare company, and you have a hunch that your customers might want to choose a horse buggy as their mode of transportation. For your painted door test, you’d design a button for a buggy option and then see how many visitors try to click on or access the feature.

While they can’t really order the horse to show up at their door yet, this painted door trial would help you gauge interest by quantifying the number of people who tried to interact with the option. Through the test, you might deduce that app-users are crazy for horse rides, and decide that it’s a no-fail feature to pursue in your next release.

While I’m not here to argue that a painted door test is never a good idea, I do want to say that the method is lacking. In particular, the method of testing what users want lacks the all-important why.

This sounds like a reliable approach to testing an idea, right? While I’m not here to argue that a painted door test is never a good idea, I do want to say that the method is lacking. In particular, this way of testing what users want lacks the all-important why.

When you look at numbers, clicks, or engagement, you lose nuance. You lose stories and verbal feedback. This is why I’ll always encourage testing prototypes with people, instead of counting clicks.

What’s wrong with the “painted door” test?

There is a wealth of information that the painted door test can’t illuminate. Let’s return to our trusty horse-and-buggy rides. If our fictional rideshare business ended up getting tons of interest through the trial, they might decide to throw time, money, and development assets into building the feature as fast as possible. And, they could put it out into the world and be surprised when it doesn’t perform as well as they anticipated.

A painted door test is binary — it tells us is people clicked or not. It doesn’t give you insight, context, and stories.

That’s because a painted door test is binary — it tells us if people clicked or not. It doesn’t give you insight, context, and stories. It’s data with no direction. Maybe people were clicking on the buggy button because they loved the idea. Or, perhaps they just were curious because they had never heard of this lovely concept. Or, maybe they liked the idea but were concerned that the buggy wouldn’t get them to dinner on time.

These are all insights that you gain from showing people your prototype and talking with them about it, not just monitoring their interaction.

Quality over quantity

One of my issues with the painted door test is that it’s overly focused on volume. Because the trial is shown to all — or a large proportion — of your users within a specific timeframe, you probably end up with thousands of data points. From this, you can create a hypothesis about what percentage of your site traffic will engage with a concept or feature. Because it generates hard data, many companies prefer this style of prototype testing; they feel that the high volume of testers gives them more accurate information on future trends and business impact.

Putting up a fake feature and seeing what happens is hard to understand and unpack. When things go “well” or “poorly,” you don’t know why.

But, while a painted door test may provide large numbers that can be used to validate an idea, it doesn’t help designers or developers understand the real drivers behind their consumer’s behaviors. Putting up a fake feature and seeing what happens is hard to understand and difficult to unpack. When things go “well” or “poorly,” you don’t know why.

On the other hand, individual, one-on-one qualitative interviews are not about quantity; they’re all about quality. In fact, in the Design Sprint process, you typically conduct “just” five user interviews on the last day of the sprint. These interviews are the culmination of the Design Sprint week and it’s the time when you talk with users about a focused prototype you’ve created.

I’ve seen first-hand that, through these five interviews, you learn so much about your prototype. You hear what your users like, what’s confusing, what’s getting lost, and what’s intriguing. The richness and insights that come out of a handful of interviews are undeniable.

Qualitative research doesn’t provide the data points that a painted door test does, but there are more stories to draw from and to inspire future design decisions.

Listen and learn

I think my insistence on the importance of user testing with prototypes is about fidelity or level of detail. The fidelity of your prototype influences the fidelity of the feedback. In other words, if your prototype is ambiguous, your customer feedback will be ambiguous as well.

When you have a nuanced, human conversation versus a binary collection of “did they click or not,” you have more to work with and more important detail to inform the work ahead. If you send out a survey, you’ll get more data points, but the conversation is biased or constrained by what you put in the survey.

One story I shared in my new book Beyond the Prototype was about Twyla, an art startup where I was the CTO. During our Design Sprint, we decided to test an idea we wanted to build — a price transparency feature. Looking back, a painted door test on this feature wouldn’t have been helpful to us. If we had made the dummy feature and no one clicked on it, we wouldn’t have had any idea of why they didn’t like the concept.

Instead, because we showed users a prototype of the concept and interviewed them directly, we found out that they didn’t like the idea. Even more important, we learned that it actively annoyed our customers. It was invaluable information to find out sooner rather than later.

So, even if you continue to conduct painted door tests at your company, consider running qualitative user testing alongside it. I think you’ll get better direction by talking with people one-on-one.

Take your feature and show it to people. Find out what they have to say. Listen intently for customers telling you what they want that you don’t currently offer. You’ll capture so much more, and it will help you refine your idea faster.

Use these learnings to tweak your prototype and test again. Keep going until you’ve got something so appealing that you’re very confident that people want it.

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In Richard Banfield’s book Enterprise Design Sprints, he talks about how Design Sprints have become “a trusted format for problem-solving at many large companies.” As the sprint’s popularity has increased, I’ve noticed that some organizations and consultancies are eager to tweak the Design Sprint process. Sometimes, that means running abbreviated or compressed sprints — trying to do the same thing in three or four days instead of the classic five.

The way that Jake Knapp originally outlined the Design Sprint process in Sprint is prescriptive and in the best way possible. It takes place over five days — a full work week. Each day has a particular set of activities; the methods walk you through gathering insights, problem framing, prototyping, and user testing.

So, why are people turning to shortened Design Sprints? Are three or four-day sprints a wise choice? Let’s explore the perceived benefits and downfalls of a quicker Design Sprint. Plus, I even got Jake’s take on three, four, and five-day sprints.

Spoiler alert: I’m a proponent of giving your Design Sprint the full five days.

The Allure of the 3 & 4 Day Design Sprint

Because everyone is hyper-busy these days, it’s unsurprising that companies want to run a Design Sprint in three or four days instead of five. It’s almost impossible to align calendars for a one-day workshop. Now you want five full days?! I get it. As a Design Sprint facilitator, people often come to me asking for a shorter format. It’s tempting— a shorter sprint may seem like a more realistic investment of time (and money). But, when you’re talking about Design Sprints, I don’t think it’s as simple as working faster and jamming more into every day.

When you’re talking about Design Sprints, I don’t think it’s as simple as working faster and jamming more into every day.

In a three or four-day Design Sprint, something has to drop off the agenda. Typically, this means that people skip prototyping or user testing. In my opinion, if you aren’t prototyping and testing, it’s NOT a Design Sprint. One of the most powerful aspects of the sprint is testing your ideas and assumptions through a prototype and hearing directly from your users. When you skip either of those steps, you cut out the moments that provide authentic direction, give voice to your users, and ensure that you’re not just navel-gazing.

“I always try to run five-day sprints because the ideas are deeper. Four days or less feel rushed and have less opportunities to uncover the boldest and most innovative ideas.” —Steph Cruchon, Design Sprint LTD.

When clients approach me about running a shorter sprint, I typically suspect a couple of issues could be at play. First, it indicates that they might not have a big enough problem in mind for their Design Sprint. If a challenge is large enough, the budget for a five-day Sprint should be there. It’s that important. Secondly, it tells me that they might not have total buy-in that this is an effective process or way of working. They’re hesitant to go all-in because they think it might not “work.”

Finally, the desire for a short sprint sometimes indicates that the organization isn’t planning on including a diverse team in the process. I’ve seen three and four-day formats based on the idea that the design team will build the prototype while the internal team is working on the rest. To drive ownership and buy-in, you have to involve everyone and keep them engaged. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a team simply pushing someone else’s work.

Is It Really Only Three or Four Days?

Another thing to be aware of with consultants or companies that promise and sell three or four-day sprints: it actually ends up being up to eight days of work. That’s because they shift some of the activities to take place before the sprint (i.e. a problem framing workshop ahead of the sprint) or they take care of some of the heavy-lifting—like prototyping—behind-the-scenes. Additionally, they might ask you to run a second, shorter sprint the week after the first sprint.

There’s not anything inherently wrong with these modes of tweaking the sprint. But, at Voltage Control, I like to focus on skill-building and transformation through the sprint process. If we take on some of the activities or “burdens,” instead of insisting that our clients do them, I think something fundamental is lost. By fully participating in the sprint from soup to nuts, our clients understand the process deeply and get the most out of the week. Next time, they might not even need our help.

The Many Benefits of a 5-Day Design Sprint

I understand why the full 5-day Design Sprint is a harder sell. There are complex schedules to coordinate and clear. A team is missing their day job for an entire workweek. There’s significant upfront work to gather your data and research. You might rent an offsite space to hold the sprint. You might need a professional facilitator. It’s challenging. However, I believe it’s worth it to push through the logistics and fear of the time investment.

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The Design Sprint was first perfected at Google, over time and with different teams and scenarios. In short, it works. Every ingredient is there for a reason.

First, the five-day Design Sprint is a well-designed, tried-and-true process. It was initially perfected at Google, over time, and with different teams and scenarios. In short, it works. Every ingredient is there for a reason.

As you might expect, when I asked Jake Knapp about his feelings on the five-day sprint, he’s still a proponent: “Five days is the most robust. I believe I can deal with anything that comes up in a five-day design sprint. Even without pre-work, I know we’ll learn something valuable by Friday.”

Second, the five-day sprint provides adequate time for two of the most critical aspects of the week. There is a full day for prototyping and a full day for user testing. (And, trust me, this will still feel rushed.) These activities are likely the ones your team needs most. Rapid prototyping is an important skill, but one that not many companies utilize often. Similarly, many companies talk to users, but not enough as they should.

“I see the Sprint like an iceberg. A lot of the magic happens below sea-level, e.g. the organizing that goes into setting up a Sprint for success both prior and post. It isn’t a silver bullet that means you are ready to launch. It is an exercise designed for learning and mitigating risk from product/service development.” —Dan Levy, More Space for Light

Lastly, it’s about flexibility. The five-day schedule leaves enough room for the unexpected to emerge, or for things to shift and tweak. The first two days are somewhat loose, but they are vital for opening up conversations and spurring the thinking that needs to happen within the group. When you cut off one or two days from your sprint, there’s a lot less time to change course or dig into something surprising.

Shorter Sprints Can Work…IF

While I’m pushing hard for companies to take the leap and invest in a five-day Design Sprint, it doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions. In my new book, Beyond the Prototype, I share a story about The Home Depot. They’ve developed a practice of three-day sprints. “We’ve adapted the traditional five-day Sprint to work more efficiently inside Home Depot’s culture,” Eugene du Plessis, Senior UX designer said. “Getting everybody in a room for five days is close to impossible.”

However, I believe that they can run shortened sprints successfully because they’ve customized slowly, and only after mastering the sprint practices as designed. Brooke Creef, UX Manager at The Home Depot, shared: “What has gotten us so much success is that we customize slowly. We were very firm in staying as tried and true…and not as flexible with agendas until we matured.”

“What has gotten us so much success is that we customize slowly. We were very firm in staying as tried and true…and not as flexible with agendas until we matured.”—Brooke Creef, UX Manager, The Home Depot

Similarly, Google runs Design Sprints of different lengths and flavors. And, like The Home Depot, I would argue that Google has “earned” the right to play with the model. They’re working from a strong foundation and are a highly-mature organization in terms of design and innovation.

Jake shared his thoughts on three-day Sprints, and Google’s in particular: “Three days is super intense, and I wouldn’t sign up for it myself. If you look at Google’s three-day Design Sprint, keep in mind they have lots of designers and researchers, many existing products to pull design patterns from, and they have material design. They’ve spent many years specializing in the Design Sprint for Google. But if you’re not at Google, be careful and consider all the resources and trade-offs required to make a three-day Design Sprint work.”

He also shares my feeling that four-day sprints might be doable, especially if the team has more experience: “I find four days works best if the facilitator is really experienced, or if the team has Design Sprint experience. Pre-work becomes really important.”

“I find four days works best if the facilitator is really experienced or if the team has Design Sprint experience.” —Jake Knapp

Conclusion: The 5-day Design Sprint is your best bet in most cases.

Design Sprints can be a path to transformative organizational change. But, there is no shortcut to outcomes. If you’re new to Design Sprints, I strongly recommend starting with a five-day sprint. It ensures that you hit all the critical activities. It also gives you the momentum and focus to continue what you’ve started after the sprint. (BTW, that’s what my book is all about — avoiding the post-sprint slump and how to transition from ideas to outcomes.)

Design Sprints can be a path to transformative organizational change. But, there is no shortcut to outcomes.

Don’t short change yourself or your team. Invest in a five-day Design Sprint. Ideally, at the end of your five days, a light bulb will go off, and you’ll realize that you can work in this style any day of the year.

The post 1-Day, 2-Day, and 3-Day Design Sprints. Do they work? appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my workshop recipe series where I’ll be sharing methods for facilitating successful workshops. I’ll break down the essentials of a Design Sprint, Innovation Workshop, Leadership Retreats, Executive Summits, and more. Check out the others here.

Whether you are conducting a Design Sprint or simply exploring a new idea or product, the user interview is that key moment when you test your prototype.

I’ve led hundreds of user interviews in my work as an innovation consultant. Through them, I’ve made missteps, learned a ton, and created straightforward tools that help me and my team at every moment of the process.

If I had a manifesto for user interviews it would be this: A deliberate, scientific approach is critical. A consistent process, plus an unbiased mindset yields realistic feedback. Effective scoring gives clarity to the results and primes you to make strategic decisions.

Below, I share how to approach planning and leading user interviews. Skip the learning curve and learn from my experiences!

The Methods

1. Recruit Interview Subjects

Estimated time commitment: 8 hours

Identifying who needs to be interviewed is essential. Define and isolate your target persona to begin your search. Some teams have dedicated researchers or partners that handle recruiting for them. If you don’t have a dedicated resource, you’ll need to personally locate your testers.

Outcomes

1. Recruit qualified interview subjects.
2. Disqualify “professional” survey takers.
3. Create targeted screener and ideal user types to interview.

Method Steps

1. Review Sprint Questions, Goal, and Target
2. List out disqualifying attributes and qualities
3. List out qualifying attributes
4. Write a screener containing questions targeting your qualifying and disqualifying attributes
5. Publish screener to http://respondent.io or similar service
6. Make an interview and “floater” schedule
7. Review & invite participants
8. Review & invite floaters

2. Plan the Interview

Estimated time commitment: 60 Minutes

The official Voltage Control Sprint Moderator Guide helps you get the most out of your 5-Act user interviews. When testing with 5 users, it’s critical that you run the interviews properly. This template is simple to use: open it and simply make a copy and rename it. Then follow the steps included to set it up for your interview.

Outcomes

1. Save time by using a prepared template for interviews.
2. Document the key questions and target of the sprint for reference during interviews.
3. Outlining your prototype’s click path structures the interview effectively.
4. Proven context questions unlock the interview subject’s insights.

Method Steps

1. Download the guide.
2. Clone the guide.
3. Customize the guide for your test.
4. Print and study the guide.
5. Follow the guide when running your interview.

PROTIP: Read more about the guide.

3. Master the Interview

Estimated time commitment: 30 Minutes

Becoming a great researcher begins with a commitment to the continual evolution of your interviewing skills. Critique your last interview — think about how it went and what you can do better. Apply your learnings to your next interview!

Outcomes

1. Improve your abilities as a researcher.
2. Follow repeatable rituals to make every interview consistent and effective.
3. Prevent bias by remaining an independent moderator.
4. Maximize for honest, unfiltered, insightful feedback from subjects.

Method Steps

1. Screen and select participants carefully. Make sure subjects are aligned with a target persona.
2. Create an interview outline and moderator guide so you can cover all essential points in the allotted time.
3. Ask context questions and build rapport with subjects to remove any pressure or stress.
4. Disassociate yourself from prototype so that honest feedback emerges.
5. Don’t sweat the small things, focus on value and remember to ask why.
6. Avoid Yes/No questions. Leave it open-ended.
7. Ask subjects to repeat themselves as necessary to validate their response.
8. Be flexible, allow for new questions and paths to emerge.
9. Don’t forget to debrief with subjects to get final insights. Ask questions like how they would explain the prototype in their own words and what they would change.

Want to know more? Check out my article here.

4. Conduct the 5 Act Interview

Estimated time commitment: 5 Hours

The 5 Act Interview is a structured 1-on-1 interview format developed at Google Ventures as part of their Design Sprint workshop methodology. The moderator builds a narrative arc that walks users through a high fidelity prototype to gain valuable insights. By immersing your user in the experience, you increase the chances to get the most realistic feedback.

Outcomes

1. A structured, repeatable, and proven interview process.
2. Open-ended, but focused, questions elicit deep understanding of a user’s experience.
3. Run your usability studies with methods from Google and Google Ventures.

Method Steps

1. Build rapport and create comfort with your participant. Start with a friendly welcome to engage the participant. Simple questions such as age, occupation, and interests build momentum at the interview’s beginning.
2. Ask context questions about the current problem the user is facing or their past experiences.
3. Introduce the prototype and remind the user to provide candid feedback, i.e. “I did not design this product. Nothing you say will flatter me or hurt my feelings. I am interested in what you are experiencing today.”
4. Create tasks that allow you to gain insights into the questions you identified as being important to your sprint. Seek to understand the customer’s experience, not specific features. For example, ask “What would you do when you are finished shopping?”
5. Follow up about the task. Ask questions like: “What were you expecting to happen?” or “What would you do next?”
6. Debrief by reiterating some of the insights you have observed during the interview. Ask things like: “How would you describe this to a friend?”, “Who is this for?”, or “What would you change about the experience today?”

5. Score the Interview

Estimated time commitment: 45 Minutes

The Voltage Control Scorecard is a shared Google Sheet that all of your interview observers can use to take interview notes simultaneously. Start with digital notes so you don’t have to type up a bunch of handwritten notes later. Assign a worksheet to each sprinter, so everyone has their own workspace, yet can see each other’s work.

Outcomes

1. Eliminate the need to transcribe Post-its or other analog note-taking methods.
2. Make interview outcomes and results instantly visible.
3. Timestamps make it easier to review the interview recordings afterward.
4. A shared team workspace creates more transparency.

Method Steps

1. Download the Voltage Control Scorecard.
2. Click on the worksheet with your name on it.
3. At the top, you’ll see columns for each tester and the rows of Y/N questions. On the bottom, you’ll see an empty section for recording insights.
4. Take a moment to read each of the Y/N questions.
5. While observing the interview, if you can confidently answer any of the Y/N questions with a Yes or No, record your answer. If the tester wasn’t completely clear or said contradictory things, mark that question with a “?” for that question. If the topic didn’t come up at all, leave it empty.
6. When you hear interesting, provocative, or concerning things from the testers, record them in the insights section at the bottom.
7. For each insight, use the drop down to select the current tester’s name, enter the timestamp using the hotkey, and type in the insight.
8. Repeat for all interviews.

PROTIP: Learn more about the Voltage Control Scorecard

I hope my step-by-step guide to planning and conducting user interviews is helpful for you! Please let me know how you used or evolved any of the tools here.

This recipe first appeared in Google’s Design Sprint Kit.

The post The Step-by-Step Guide to Leading Insightful User Interviews appeared first on Voltage Control.