The best and most successful products and services are designed with the end-user in mind. When you understand your customer, you can effectively create what they want and need. That’s the idea behind design thinking– a human-centric approach to ideate and solve problems creatively. The methodology is both a mindset and a process to generate bold and innovative ideas and tackle business challenges and problems. You can better understand the human behind your next product, method, service, or process idea using design thinking exercises during any phase of your project. These exercises offer an engaging, interactive, hands-on approach to problem-solving.

Design thinking exercises and design thinking workshops encompass the 5-step design thinking process:

1. Empathize – Understand the perspective of the target audience/customer/consumer to identify and address the problem at hand.
2. Define – Define the problem statement clearly.
3. Ideate –  Brainstorm ways to address identified unmet needs.
4. Prototype – Identity which of the possible solutions can best solve the identified problem(s).
5. Test – Test the product with your target audience to get feedback.

This five-step process enables teams to come up with impactful solutions to real problems that are vetted by the people they intend to serve before they’ve even been built. There are specific design thinking exercises that can help you and your team get the most out of each step. Let’s take a look at some of our favorites.

Design Thinking Exerices

We’ve compiled some of our favorite design thinking exercises for you to use among your teams as soon as tomorrow. Plug them in where you need them in your project process and watch the magic unfold.

1. Warmups

At your next meeting, don’t dive right into logistics or action items. Open with one of these warm-ups or “icebreakers” to set the tone for the meeting. They help shake people up and establish that you will be thinking differently in this session. Use one or two of these design thinking exercises to start your meeting or workshop on the right note. They can also be used to punctuate the day and energize the group after long activities or breaks.

Yes, But vs. Yes, And

This warm-up shows the power of building others’ ideas versus shooting them down. Taken from one of the principles of improv comedy, in this activity, you pair people and have them do the following:

• Part One: Person A suggests doing something with Person B, who has to answer with a reason not to do it, starting with “Yes, but…” Person A responds with a counter-suggestion also using “Yes, but…” (Example: Person A: “Let’s go to the grocery store.” Person B: “Yes, but our refrigerator is broken.” Person A: “Yes, but, we still need to eat.”)
• Part Two: Person A makes a suggestion, but now Person B answers with “Yes, and…” And so on… (Example: Person A: “Let’s go to the grocery store.” Person B: “Yes, and let’s get avocados.” Person A: Yes, and let’s make guacamole.”)

Impromptu Networking

In this exercise, take about 20 minutes for participants to meet in pairs and introduce themselves to each other and answer the question: “What big challenge do you bring to this gathering? What do you hope to get from and give this group or community?” By the end, each person will talk to about four people and learn something new about their colleagues or teammates. Impromptu Networking is excellent when your meeting attendees don’t know each other, or even when they do; either way, participants quickly gain new perspectives on the people they’ll be working with throughout the meeting or day.

Nine Whys

Like Impromptu Networking, the Nine Whys is a Liberating Structures activity. Here’s how they describe this warm-up:

“Ask, “What do you do when working on ______ (the subject matter or challenge at hand)? Please make a short list of activities.” Then ask, “Why is that important to you?” Keep asking, “Why? Why? Why?” up to nine times or until participants can go no deeper because they have reached the fundamental purpose for this work.”

By asking “Why?” so many times in a row, you can ultimately get to a clear understanding of why you are gathering and what the purpose of your meeting is.

2. Empathize

Empathy is a critical starting point for any design thinking endeavor. It means making design and business decisions from the perspective of the end-user or customer and truly understanding and anticipating their needs. These design thinking exercises help you get into the minds of your users, identify patterns and challenges, and relate these to the problem your team needs to solve.

Personas

Creating personas is an effective way to focus on your user and ensure that you are designing for their top needs. Personas are a representation of your target user — their typical characteristics, challenges, and desires. On average, you create one to three personas for your project so that you can focus on different needs and inspire divergent ways of looking at a problem.

This worksheet (available for download here) shows you the different aspects you might define for your persona.

Find another good explanation for how to create a persona here.

User Journey Mapping

User or customer journey mapping is another critical exercise when you are trying to build empathy for the user and uncover new ways to answer their top needs. Start by identifying all of the moments that a user goes through from start to finish when interacting with your particular product, service, or experience. These are your moments or milestones along the top of your journey map.

For example, imagine that you are designing a new experience of going through the TSA checkpoint at the airport. Your moments along the top of this user journey map might be: Pack for Trip — Travel to Airport — Arrive at Airport — Find Security Line — Show ID to TSA — Go through Security — Find Gate — Arrive at Destination.

Once you have your top-level journey moments or touchpoints, use your personas (see above) to go step-by-step and capture what your user is feeling, thinking, and doing at every phase. Through this process, you can begin to map the breadth of problems your user faces to identify the most prominent issues to tackle through design or innovation.

Read more about journey mapping here.

3. Ideation

Ideation is the phase of your project when you need to generate many different possible solutions or answers to your user’s problems or challenges. You don’t want to come up with one idea and put all your energy and focus into that. The goal of ideation is to go wide, come up with tons of ideas (even crazy ones) so that you have a lot to work with when it is time to focus on some ideas to prototype and test. When you need to get the creativity flowing, these design thinking exercises will unleash your thought process.

SCAMPER

SCAMPER is a method of focused brainstorming. But, rather than just saying “Come up with ideas!”, the SCAMPER acronym runs you through seven techniques for idea generation: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate and Reverse.

You use SCAMPER like this: first, identify the product or service you’re working with or the business question at hand. Run through the SCAMPER list and ask yourself questions based on the letters. (You can feel free to jump around and focus on the ones that are inspiring you the most.)

For example, let’s say you work at Uber. You need to think of ways to innovate. You take Combine and think: How could I combine Uber with another experience that riders need? You say to yourself: Riders need food when they are coming home in an Uber late at night. This might lead you to think of an experience where Uber riders can order pizza and a car at the same time. Their driver arrives with a hot pizza in the car and the rider can eat it on the way home. (Ok, this example might just describe UberEats, but you get the idea.)

Read more about SCAMPER and find prompting questions for each letter here.

Crazy 8s

Crazy 8s is an activity that we run as part of every Design Sprint, but it can be used anytime you want to come up with a bunch of ideas quickly. The simplicity of this one is wonderful:

1. Grab a piece of paper and fold it into eight sections
2. Set a timer for 8 minutes
3. Have participants sketch a distinct idea in each section. (Remind them that the ideas don’t have to be amazing, or even viable. The point is getting ideas down on paper and not censoring themselves.)

Find out more about Crazy 8s here.

4. Decisions

It can be easy and fun to come up with new ideas and solutions. But, making decisions? Not always as fun or straightforward. Thankfully, design thinking provides us with some great methods to help filter information. Try these design thinking exercises to help you make creative and impactful decisions.

Affinity Grouping

Affinity grouping is a way to bubble up big themes in a large group of ideas. Assess all of the ideas you’ve generated as a group. Hopefully, you’re working with Post-its, and you can start to move or cluster like ideas together. Create a name or theme for each group of ideas. Once you have a set of big ideas, you can vote as a group about what is most important to focus on.

Dot Voting

Dot voting is another way you can get a sense of what ideas are resonating as most important with the group. Give everyone in the group 3–5 (or more!) sticky dots. At the same time, have everyone put their dots on the idea or concept that they like the most. In the end, you have a heat map of the ideas that the group gravitates toward.

Note and Vote

Note and Vote is another method that comes out of the Design Sprint. The benefit of this exercise is that it gives everyone an equal vote or voice in decision-making. It’s super simple but effective.

Let’s say you have a series of ideas that you are reviewing as a group. Have everyone silently write down which idea is their favorite on a Post-it note. Once they’re done, have everyone put their vote up on the wall or whiteboard at the same time. Review the votes, see what idea has the most votes, and have a conversation around the pros and cons of the 1–3 “winners.”

Design thinking exercises are a highly effective way to ensure your next project is a success. Incorporate them with your team today and create meaningful work together. Pro-tip: use our Liberating Structures templates to get the most out of the design-thinking process with your team.

Learn more about design thinking and facilitation at one of our workshops or events!

We host regular Facilitation Lab meetups, boot camps, summits, and virtual workshops. See a full list of upcoming events here.

The post The Best Design Thinking Exercises for Each Phase of a Project appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

Jeff Gothelf’s path to top product strategy consultant may have started with wanting to take his girlfriend on some nice dates. Jeff was a self-declared broke musician looking to make extra money for dinners with his new girlfriend (now his wife). “I was a computer geek as a kid, so the internet (aka Web 1.0) was where I headed immediately. Back then, if you could spell HTML, you could get a job. The rest is history…”

Today, Jeff is a well-known coach, speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations build better products and works with executives to build the cultures that build better products. As well as Lean UX, he’s the co-author of Sense and Respond and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking. Recently, he co-founded Sense & Respond Press, a publishing house for modern, transformational business books.

He was nominated for a Thinkers50 award for innovation. Over his 20 years in technology, Jeff has worked to bring a customer-centric, evidence-based approach to product strategy, design, and leadership at a wide range of companies, like Neo Innovation, TheLadders, Webtrends, and AOL. He regularly keynotes conferences, teaches workshops, and works directly with client leadership teams across North America, Europe, and Asia.

A Lesson from the Circus

Before he got into tech, Jeff’s first “real” job was in the circus. He was graduating from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia with a degree in Mass Communications and a specialization in Audio Production. As the circus was about to come through town, they reached out to the school for an audio engineer recommendation. The job had Jeff’s name written all over it. With a little encouragement from his parents, Jeff joined a literal three-ring circus. “I put my junk in storage on Sunday. I had a motorcycle, a Bob Marley poster, and a mattress. That was it. On Monday, I’m in the circus.”

As the sound and lighting guy for Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers Circus, Jeff spent six months on the road. “I hung out with clowns. The human cannonball was my friend. We traveled around — every two days we were in a new place. I slept in the back of a semi with seven other dudes.”

“The circus opportunity helped me, or motivated me, to jump in the deep end and learn how to swim once I got there.”

Along with the great stories, Jeff left the circus with a life lesson that is still relevant to him today: “I think the main thing that it’s taught me is to just try. When the opportunity came to write my first book, [the publisher] came to me and said, ‘You’re the Lean UX guy. Do you want to write the Lean UX book?’ I’d never thought about writing a book. To me, it seemed like an insurmountable task. Like a mountain to climb and I’m not a mountain climber. But the circus opportunity helped me, or motivated me, to jump in the deep end and learn how to swim once I got there.”

What’s the Motivation?

In addition to his fascinating backstory, Jeff and I spoke about the prevalence of innovation labs at companies today. I was curious to know what he thought about how they worked or how they could be better. “The idea of an innovation lab is seductive and interesting, but almost every company gets it wrong. It can’t generate the kind of big innovative leaps they’d hoped for with these labs.”

Patience is one factor that Jeff identifies as an issue: “Organizations put the money into the lab, but they don’t have the patience of a VC firm. They’re not going to wait five to seven years for a good idea to return on that investment. They want something in three months or six months. So they start to get antsy, and the labs get a lot of pressure to generate something, and then they shut down.”

“What’s the motivation for them to take their excellent entrepreneurial ideas, spirit, and activities and do this without some kind of an equity stake?”

Another pitfall that Jeff talked about in regards to innovation groups at large companies is motivation: “You take smart people and build a team or a business unit around them. But what’s the motivation for them to take their excellent entrepreneurial ideas, spirit, and activities and do this without some equity stake?” I think it’s an important point and one that’s not often discussed. What rewards do employees reap at big companies for trying to push break-through ideas?

At a previous consulting company, Jeff and his team even created a concept that would try to tackle this issue: “Innovation Studio was a well-funded, patient in-house ‘lab’ that was adequately staffed, funded, and had a clear idea of what to do with the successful and unsuccessful ventures it housed. Most importantly, it brought in staff who had strong ideas and would end up with equity in their ideas should they be deemed successful. The lab would provide guidance, coaching, and the skillsets (design, engineering, product management, etc.) necessary for the best chance of success. In the end, it was all about incentive structures. I haven’t seen it done this way before.”

Expressed vs. Latent Customer Needs

Jeff is firmly customer-centric in his perspective. He defines innovation as: “Creating a new way to deliver value to customers that differentiates you from the competition.” And he feels that customer-centricity — “solve a real problem for a real customer in a meaningful way” — is the innovation silver bullet.

“Our job, as the makers of products and services, is to discover and understand customers’ latent needs.”

With this in mind, Jeff and I dug into the debate around whether or not we can trust customers to know or articulate what they need and want. (Maybe this should be called the Henry Ford debate since it often stems from Ford’s supposed quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”)

Jeff said: “Customers know what they need to do. They know what they’re trying to achieve. They know what problem they’re trying to solve, what task they’re trying complete, and what their goal is. Our job, as the makers of products and services, is to discover and understand those latent needs.”

As designers, we need to identify what is below or behind the needs that customers express. “An expressed need is something like: ‘I need to apply for a mortgage.’ The latent need is: ‘I need to find a home that I can afford, a mortgage that allows me to live the kind of life I’d like to give my kids…’ Good product people get to the latent needs through the various and manifold activities of customer discovery.”

“Good product people get to the latent needs through the various and manifold activities of customer discovery.”

Once you pinpoint the customer’s latent need, there’s certainly finesse in how you develop products to answer those needs. “How you solve those problems is product design and development work. There are people, like Steve Jobs, who were particularly good at this. They are very good at dreaming up amazing new ways to solve existing problems. They are either in charge of the company, willing to roll the success of a company on these ideas, or, were in a position of enough influence where they were able to get their ideas to see the light of day. But at the root, all of these ideas are solving real problems for real customers.”

He continued: “Customers have no idea that they want a touch screen necessarily. But what they do know, is that they’d like to carry fewer devices or they’d like to communicate more efficiently, or they’d like to be able to do certain things that their current devices don’t allow them to do. So there’s a conflation of customers not knowing what they want and being outstanding product people and innovators.”

Leaders Who Get It

Jeff stresses the importance of leadership and cultural change for organizations that want to work in new and innovative ways. “Many organizations attempt to implement ‘agile,’ ‘lean startup,’ or ‘lean UX’ in their ways of working, but don’t realize that without a cultural and leadership mindset shift, these things would never yield their full benefits.”

That’s why Jeff does significant coaching work with leaders. He’s most excited when he gets a chance to work with “leaders who get it.” He said, “When I meet leaders at companies who truly want to change how THEY work and THEN how their company works, I am excited to find ways to collaborate with them.”

“When I meet leaders at companies who truly want to change how THEY work and THEN how their company works, I am excited to find ways to collaborate with them.”

When it comes to leadership, Jeff’s less concerned with teaching the methods of lean, agile, or design thinking. He’s more interested in how the mindset behind these concepts lives at the top level of an organization.

“The reality is that [leaders] don’t care necessarily about sprints, retros, burn down charts, and velocity. But agility? If you can teach them what agility means, how to lead with agility, or how to lead an agile organization, then you stand a shot of getting the methodologies implemented and the teams working differently.”

“There has to be a realization that this means that how you lead and how you manage is also changing.”

Jeff believes that it has to be top-down. For innovation to take root in a company, leadership must provide support, have a deep understanding of what something like “agility” means, and be willing to change themselves. “There has to be a realization that this means that how you lead and how you manage is also changing.”

“Changing the way that you manage, changing the way that you lead, changing the way that you incentivize an organization to outcomes is the key to all of this.”

Jeff just launched a Professional Scrum with UX course. He created with Josh Seiden and in conjunction with scrum.org. “It’s a new certification course that does a good job of bridging the gap between user experience, design, and scrum — how do you reconcile these things together. It was over a year’s worth of work with lots of iterations and test classes.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post From Circus Tech to Keynote Speaker appeared first on Voltage Control.

The 5 Act Interview is a structured 1-on-1 interview format developed at Google Ventures as part of their Design Sprint workshop methodology.

At Voltage Control, I often moderate interviews on behalf of my clients. Some of our clients don’t have UX Researchers on staff, their teams aren’t experienced in this type of interviewing, or they are too overwhelmed with other work to help out. When not running the interviews, I’m often coaching my clients or startups that I mentor on how to get the most out of their interviews. These coaching sessions are full of tips and tricks from my experiences moderating nearly a thousand interviews and watching countless others. I hope this post helps you refine and improve your 5 Act interview.

Respect The Craft

Just because you didn’t go to school for something, it doesn’t mean you can’t be good at it. I did not go to school for UX research, but it’s a craft I’ve honed because I’m passionate about it.

Becoming a great researcher begins with a commitment to the continual improvement of your process. You should always be looking at your last interview—think about how it went and what you can do better next time. Focus on evolving and deepening your skills with each interview.

Be Friendly and Set Expectations

With only an hour to spend with each tester, you need to set things up for success quickly. Be friendly and set expectations to avoid fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Provide context about the project and discuss how the process works. Remind them why they were chosen and thank them for their perspective.

If relevant, let them know that team members will be observing from another room. Point out that while the team will be watching, you’ll be the only one interacting and talking with the tester. Get their permission to record the session.

Scrutinize the Screener

It can be easy to blame the recruiting when you hear feedback that is unsettling or that challenges some of your beliefs. Spend plenty of time on your screener and make sure that it is bulletproof.

Start with your Goal and Target in mind, and build a list of attributes that define the individuals you’d like to gather insights from. In addition to considering inclusive criteria, explore the things that would cause you to exclude someone from your study. When writing the screener, combine the inclusive and exclusive criteria in ways that obfuscate your desired test subject’s attributes. I even like to throw in extra questions or answers that will throw off applicants that are just trying to interview for the compensation.

I recommend sharing your Screener with your entire Sprint team before it goes out to get additional feedback.

Pro Tip: Use this worksheet from Google Ventures for writing a screener

Make a Mod Guide

A good interview starts with an interview guide, also known as the “mod guide.” Start by re-writing your Sprint questions as “Yes/No” questions such that the desired answer is “Yes.” This will help reduce confusion on the team with scoring the interviews. Collect questions from the team about the prototype, capture all their curiosities and concerns as “Yes/No” questions.

Additionally, write a series of “context” questions that dive into the tester’s prior experiences, opinions, desires, fears, and concerns. Include a prototype guide that maps out each page and lists the active hot spots. If there are specific concerns or things to explore, they can be placed on this map. Last, write a set of debriefing questions.

I also like include a reference section and a set of reminders. The reminders are there to remind me to turn off notifications, clear my desktop, prepare necessary links, etc. When I first started running interviews, I would add things to this reminders list as I tripped over things or bumped into issues while conducting an interview. Over time you’ll have a mod guide template that is tailored to your needs.

Pace Yourself

Pace out your interview so that you can make the most of your time with the user. Don’t go too quickly. Allow time for the user to explain themselves. Probe deeper if needed.

Plan out your schedule ahead of time. Decide how much time you want to spend on section or topic. Put this schedule in your mod guide and stick to it. Relying on this pre-defined schedule will help you keep the lower priority conversations from taking up the whole interview.

Context Questions

Take your time to build rapport, see what comes out, don’t move onto the prototype too quickly. The context questions are a great way to learn more about a user and how they think about or use your product.

Ask questions to understand the interviewee’s background as well as how they’ve used your product in the past. These insights can be helpful additions to existing research that has been done. They can also help to bucket the tester into a “Jobs To Be Done” category or other affinity groups you are using for your users.

These questions also allow you to put the user at ease before introducing the prototype. They provide a moment for the tester to transition into the more detailed work of responding to your prototype. This transition is vital for collecting honest and accurate insights.

Introducing the Prototype

Start with a simple explanation of prototypes. Explain that some things may not work and that’s ok. Tell them that there are no right or wrong answers and that they can’t hurt your feelings or flatter you.

Ask them to speak out loud. Point out things they love, things they hate, things that confuse them, or things that jump out for some reason or another. Remind them that you’ll be there to guide them and will encourage them to speak up when they get quiet.

Don’t Skip the Segue

Design Sprint prototypes always start with a segue. The first few screens of a prototype are dedicated to transitioning the user into the experience. Even though we’ve warmed them up with context questions and got their “head in the game,” we don’t want to drop them deep into a prototype without any context.

Typically we will start them off with a screen or visual that sets up our scenario. They may be looking at a Google search bar if we expect them to do a Google search, they may be looking at a fictional TechCrunch article or a mock ad on a popular website. We’ve even started with an email from their boss.

Even though we aren’t “testing” these initial screens of the prototype, it’s essential for the user to start here. This is their tunnel into the prototype and helps them deeply transition into the scenario.

Focus on Desirability

Often I see interviewers concentrating on usability. However, you’ll get much more significant insights if you focus on desirability. While your mod guide will have a list of tasks you’d like to complete, the interview shouldn’t be overly prescriptive about what the user is doing and/or how easy it is to do things. Instead, you are seeking to learn their level of excitement or intrigue for the solution concept. Listen carefully to the language they use and what peaks their interest and where they get bored.

Embrace Serendipity

Allow the user to choose their own adventure. You’ll learn some unexpected things that you wouldn’t have learned with a rigid approach. Instead of giving the user a set of tasks to complete, follow them through the experience and see where they go, in what order and why. If you missed some things along the way, back up and explore them. Ask them why they initially skipped over them.

Introduce Alternative Scenarios

Even when we’ve spent a lot of time upfront crafting the perfect scenarios, we can be confronted with new revelations during the interview. Either the user gets stuck or confused by the script, or the conversation reveals a new situation that might be useful to pursue. You can gather additional insights into how the user reacts to the solution by introducing these alternative scenarios.

I find this especially useful when the user is confused or gets tripped up on some details in the scenario. Sometimes they keep defaulting to something that is more familiar with them. In that case, it is helpful to introduce some nuance to the scenario to help them perceive it as a new and different situation. Other times the user will say something that prompts me to develop an entirely new scenario on the fly.

Flip the Yes/No

When moderating interviews, be conscious not to bias the tester by asking “Yes/No” questions. (Also, multiple choice questions are in fact “Yes/No” questions in disguise.) If you are anything like me, you probably still blurt out some leading questions by mistake. When this happens, just tack on something more “open.” When you hear that “Yes/No” question come out of your mouth, immediately follow it up with something that prompts them to expound on their answer.

If you can’t tack on before they answer or you didn’t even realize you did it until you hear them say “Yes,” you can just ask them “Why?” or “Could you expand on that for me?” It’s not ideal to prime them with that “Yes,” however, if you can get them talking, then you might just salvage the situation and get some really valuable insights which might negate that “Yes.”

Have you ever noticed that almost 100% of the time testers will say “Yes” when asked a “Y/N” question? Test subjects are prone to be agreeable, which can skew results. For this reason, I encourage founders and innovators to seek to disprove their beliefs. Instead of searching for confirmation, search for things that contradict your beliefs!

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Be Vague

Another way to avoid bias is to be vague in the language you use when asking uestions. Avoid saying specific words that appear in the UI such as “Buy Now” or “Pricing” or “Learning Center.” You want to know what users see naturally and how they interpret them. Instead, you want to be vague and provide general guidance to nudge them toward the object in question. Spend some time when crafting your mod guide to write some of these unbiased prompts.

You should also avoid asking if they would click on a button or even what they would click on. A more generic prompt like “What would you do next?” gives them much more freedom in how they might respond, which will provide you with a more truthful answer.

Here’s some of my favorites probing questions:

• What’s that there above search?
• Can you explain what that blue thing does?
• Can you explain that to me?
• What would you do next?
• Can you elaborate on that?
• What do you think about that? How does it make you feel?

Make Them Repeat It

When a user says something that is vague or confusing, it is tempting to say “Did you just say XYZ?” If it is unclear what they said, ask them to repeat it. (“I’m not sure I understood that” or “Could you repeat that?”)

While you could argue that this is an OK time to ask a “Y/N” question, it is preferred to ask them to repeat themselves.

Sometimes I do this for the benefit of my observers, to ensure that they got a clear understanding of the tester’s line of thinking. Other times, I do it because I have a hunch that there is more to what they are saying than is immediately apparent. For instance, I may think that an innocuous statement may actually be more profound than it seems on the surface, so I’ll dig in and make them go deeper to expose this broader implication.

Probe For Expectations

One of my favorite techniques is to slow the user down and have them explain their expectations and interpretations of things before clicking through to reveal subsequent parts of the prototype. Sometimes we design “waiting” screens just to slow down the user and give the interviewer an opportunity to talk with them before they jump to the next important screen.

Once I collect their observations and thoughts, I’ll ask them to proceed forward to the next screen. Then I’ll ask them how this matches their expectations. Sometimes, it clearly doesn’t match, but it may be better than they were expecting. We explore all of this together. Did this shock them? In a good way or did it bum them out?

Tease Out Details

Dig into your tester’s responses and comments, ask follow-on questions and dive deep into the details. Your goal is to pick up on the user’s nuances and preferences and then ask them further questions related to those. Think about different ways to ask “why?” Asking “why?” repeatedly is an effective way to dive deeper into the inquiry, but it can exhaust your tester. Instead, think of ways to dress up the language, or how to ask why using different words each time.

Explore the Unknown

If your prototype only hints at features but doesn’t show the details, you can still ask the user about what they expect from that feature. One of my favorite things to do is to ask the tester what they would expect to happen if they clicked on something.

For instance, imagine they try to click on a button that is not actively in the interface. The button was placed there for a reason, maybe the team had talked about how they would like to support personalized content, and this button would allow the user to set those preferences. When the user tries to click on that button, I might say: “What do you think this is? What do you expect to happen if you clicked on it?” This gives us perspective on how the user thinks about this part of the solution and if they consider it helpful.

Embrace the Unexpected

If some feedback surfaces that isn’t directly related to the prototype goals, you can still seize the moment to get more understanding of the user’s past experience with both your product and competitor products. Explore these areas and allow the user to go deeper into those areas as time permits. Sometimes these insights will provide unique and unexpected insights that can be profound and transformative.

Always Debrief

Before ending the session, debrief to get final insights, such as how they would explain the prototype in their own words and what they would change. This moment of reflection is a great way to capture their major objections and overall impressions. I especially like to hear the words they use to describe the solution as they are reflecting on what they saw.

Some of my favorite debrief questions:

• What surprised you about what you saw today?
• Who do you think would use something like this?
• In your own words, how would you describe it to a friend?
• What are the pros and cons of this prototype?
• How does it compare to things you’ve seen in the past?
• If you had a magic wand and could add, remove, or tweak anything about what you saw today, what would you change?
• How would you feel about using this in the future?
• What else should we know?

Scorecard

Skip the post-it notes; they are too messy to deal with at the end of a long day. Instead, make an online scorecard that everyone can fill out in real time. At Voltage Control, we use a shared Google Sheets file. The sheet has all the Sprint Questions listed out and also includes Prototype questions. They are all Y/N question, 1 per row and 1 column per tester. This workbook is duplicated per Sprint team member. Each team member will score each question for each interview. There is a section at the bottom of capturing big insights and quotes!

The following week, the recap goes much smoother as all of the notes and quotes are already in the same Google Sheets file. We review this doc together, discussing any disagreements and synthesizing all our findings into an action plan.

Hopefully, these thoughts will help you improve your 5 Act Interview. I would love to hear about your experiences applying these ideas, or if you have additional ideas or tweaks. Please comment below and we can all become better listeners together! If you found this post helpful, please clap. Clapping helps the content reach more people like you.

The post Mastering the 5 Act User Interview appeared first on Voltage Control.

When I get asked this question, my first step is to sit down with the team, ideally at a whiteboard, where we work through their situation. Sometimes this process ends up resembling a condensed version of Day 1 and a map of the problem space often evolves on the whiteboard. This is a good indicator that it is a good time for a Sprint.

Reflecting on the various scenarios and conditions that have proven well suited for a design Sprint, I’ve organized them into three categories: uncertain priorties around disparate business opportunities, lack of product solution fit, and inability to decide between two competing solutions to a problem.

Prioritizing Potential Business Opportunities

When you are having difficulty prioritizing between various business opportunities and customer demands, a Sprint can provide clarity and focus around where the company should devote resources. You may find that just completing the first 3 days provides that adequate clarity and focus. However, completing a full Sprint will result in prototyping and testing one or more concepts, which provides deeper customer insights. In either case, a Sprint is a valuable tool to focus your company.

Exploring Product Solution Fit

Often a product has been built without adequate understanding of the customer or the job they expect the product to do for them. If your product is a square peg in a round hole, or you simply think there is room to improve, it may be time to consider a design Sprint. The process can help to unpack the problem space, and attempt to hone in on the cause of your misalignment. This is an example of the type of Sprint where you might repeat Day 4 and Day 5 to get more refined in your understanding of how to address your customers needs.

Testing Divergent Solutions

The Sprint book captures this category perfectly with the example from Slack. When you have two strong opinions around how to address an issue with an existing solution, or how to bring a new solution to the market, it is a perfect time for a Sprint. You should be able to breeze through Day 1, and maybe even Day 2, as you are already at a point where you have conceptualized two solutions. That said, I encourage you not to skip them altogether, as those days are useful in aligning all your stakeholders. Everyone’s individual work will expose new and innovative ideas.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with one simple rubric: Consider whether an A/B test would be an appropriate method of answering your big questions. If not, then a design Sprint is a likely candidate. A/B testing is helpful in testing incremental changes, while design Sprints and similar research-based discovery processes are better suited for more strategic maneuvers.

If you are thinking of hosting your own design sprint and need help or are just curious, I look forward to hearing from you.

The post When to run a Design Sprint appeared first on Voltage Control.