How to Run a Design Sprint

At GV (Google Ventures), we do design projects with a huge variety of startups, from Nest to Foundation Medicine to Blue Bottle Coffee. One of the key ways that we help our portfolio companies is through a process that we call a ''5 Day Design Sprint.'' Over just five days, we ideate, prototype, and real-world test products. This process isn't just for startups - we've had a lot of success designing products using sprints at well-established companies (like Google!) too.

This workshop is going to be practical to a fault. Design sprints are about solving real problems in real businesses in the real world, so we're going to give you specific, repeatable techniques and tools for making your product teams move faster and more confidently.

DAY01:Cooper 2days Condensed Goal-Directed Design course

Understanding the big picture: (the first half of day one: a light overview of our approach)

1. Goal-Directed Design overview esent best practices for working in creative teams, including Cooper's approach to paired design and thought partnership
2. Introduce the sample project, PhotoStar, that will be used throughout the course
3. Interpret and re-articulate the project brief to clarify business objectives and value statements Using personas to target your design thinking (second half of day one: using personas as a tool for design exploration, evaluation and storytelling)
4. Introduce the role that personas play as the primary characters in the stories you tell about your design concepts
5. Introduce (pre-made) PhotoStar personas to participants, and conduct a series of activities that help participants clearly articulate the personas’ life goals, experience goals and end-goals

Use personas to identify existing mental models and biases that will impact the users’ expectations of your product

1. Utilize personas’goals to identify opportunity areas for the product

Information Architecture for Everybody

No matter what your job or mission in life: if you are working with other people you are dealing with information architecture. Information Architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable. Whether it is determining the labels for your products and services or creating navigational systems to help users move through a complex ecosystem of marketing channels, everybody architects information.

The concepts one has to understand to practice information architecture thoughtfully are not hard to learn or based on expensive tools. In fact they are tools and concepts we at the Information Architecture Institute think everybody should know. This half day workshop is meant to introduce the concepts of IA and give you confidence in practicing IA yourself.

Storyboarding: Communicating Your Ideas with Comics amp; Drawings

Storyboards capture an experience in a visual way. They communicate complex ideas in succinct, understandable ways—whether for planning a feature film or the user experience of an application.

Kevin Cheng uses comics to make storyboards more understandable. And he even wrote a book about it for Rosenfeld Media; it’s entitled See What I Mean.

In this workshop, Kevin teaches how organisations like Google, eBay, and the U.S. Postal Service have opted for comics (instead of lengthy reports or requirements docs) to tell the stories of their users and their products.

You don’t need illustrator skills to do it, either. Kevin will show you how.

DAY02:Cooper 2days Condensed Goal-Directed Design course

Designing with scenarios and defining the qualities of an ideal user experience

1. Use narrative to imagine your future product by using scenarios that clearly articulate situations the personas are in and how those situations can be transformed
2. Extract functional and data needs from scenarios: a light walk-through of requirements and planning
3. Participate in a design exploration workshop: a series of exercises to encourage idea generation and support lateral thinking (note: this is not a "how to" on wireframing and interface design)
4. Conduct effective design presentations and reviews by showing examples, and learn how to give and receive input
5. Take part in a mock review using the rough design sketches created in class