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A Design Sprint at Hike One is a structured process to develop new concepts, solve big challenges or improve existing products in 1 week. The method compresses months of work into a few days and is developed by Jake Knapp at Google Ventures.
With executing over 80 Design Sprints in the past 2,5 years we learned some things. Our top recommendation is, that when you combine a design sprint with an iteration sprint you get the most value out of your sprint and bridge the gap between concept and product design.
Design sprints make ideas tangible in no-time and give you a glimpse into the future. That way they provide you with real customer insights early on in the process, instead of committing time and budget to a direction which may not be the right one.
Around 80% of new product introductions fail. The main reason: customers simply don’t need the majority of newly introduced products. To get to a product-solution fit, you need to get your product ideas in front of real users, as fast as possible. Learn early on what brings real value to your customer. Design sprints are the fastest and most cost-effective way to do this. The process helps you to involve your stakeholders, come up with innovative new ideas, turn them into prototypes and test them.
Both our clients and our designers love design sprints. They eliminate the guesswork and make things real in no time. We used Design Sprints to design products like the award-winning radio 538 app for Talpa Radio, validate a grocery subscription service for PostNL and really involve users in the development of their new movie ticketing app for Cineville.
A sprint starts with a big challenge. It takes the team through a full design cycle in a few days. This is how it works: on Monday you define the challenge and produce solutions. On Tuesday you decide what to prototype, Wednesday is about building a high-fidelity prototype, on Thursday the prototype is tested with real users.
By the end of a design sprint, you will have a high-fidelity interactive prototype of a new or improved idea, product or feature that has been tested with end-users. You will have a much better picture of the problem you are trying to solve. A lot of hard questions have been answered. You probably have a clear plan for the next steps.
Now that you have a high-fidelity prototype of your product, together with actionable insights from real users, it’s much easier to decide on the next steps. We often recommend our clients to do an iteration sprint to follow-up on the learnings of the design sprint. Or run a couple more design sprints to cover other targets on the map.
Working with Hike One, you get access to over 70 designers, with a wide variety of skills. Depending on the topic we add illustrators, prototypers and animators to the sprint to ensure you have an awesome representation of your product ready in just 1 week.
We’ve started experimenting with Design Sprints in 2015. Since then, we’ve helped over 80 clients using this method. It’s our favourite method. We actually use the most up to date version of the Design Sprint here at Hike One: The Design Sprint 2.0. We also provide masterclasses on running design sprints.
