Design Sprint, exposed!
With the popularity of this new UX design methodology coined by Jake Knapp, we hear everything and nothing about the Sprint, but how does it work in practice? What does this famous prototype look like? What is the ROI? — We show everything.
This is an article about GV style Design Sprints. If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more here or read the book.
In this video, you’ll see for the first time:
- Photos of a whole 5 day Design Sprint
- The prototype made on day 4
- What worked or did not work during the tests
- Feedback from the client and the dev agency who took over the project
- The return on investment from this Design Sprint
A few weeks ago, my team and I welcomed the great Jake Knapp (creator of the Design Sprint at Google Ventures) to our hometown of Lausanne, Switzerland, for an exceptional workshop.
We knew that Jake would present inspiring case studies, and oh boy did he deliver (Google Hangouts, the robot Savioke and even Slack). All are of course mentioned in the book, but what a pleasure to discover the little details of these legendary Sprints.
The question then arose: “Should we also show something?”
Let’s prove that it’s realistic
Very often in old Europe, the reaction to the Sprint (or any other innovative approach to work) sounds a bit like: “Yeah it’s interesting, thank you, but you know for us it’s too different — we’re not in California.” (In other words, “We’re happy with our processes from the ‘90s.”)
Well, no, Design Sprint is realistic, pragmatic, and applicable to any company, be it in the Alps or Annaheim. The proof is that hundreds of companies and organizations are already putting it into practice across the globe.
The cult of NDA
Design Sprint is part of a race for innovation. Most of the time we are asked to sign tons of non-disclosure agreements. This is the game, we accept it willingly, and it is true that we work regularly on top secret projects. In addition, we live in Switzerland, where the culture is built around Gruyère cheese and bank secrecy.
In the end, it is usually quite complicated for us to show our work in detail — and this is shared by other Sprintmasters worldwide. You will easily find stories of Design Sprints online, or photos of people sticking post-its, but seeing an actual prototype and the results post-sprint… Well, this never happens. UNTIL NOW.
The Swiss Tech Convention Center
We’ve done a lot of Design Sprints. But since most of them are confidential, I had to think carefully about what would be the ideal project to showcase.
Well, the workshop for the complete website overhaul of the Swiss Tech Convention Center of EPFL (one of the largest congress centers in Europe) had been really exciting.
The new website, built in the three months following the Sprint, was released last December. And a whole marketing automation system had been integrated, so we were gathering a lot of data.
It was also important that the scope of the project wouldn’t be too crazy. It’s hard to identify with a Google-style billion dollar company running Sprints. I wanted a project that big corporates and SMEs could relate to.
I reached out to Christophe, the Decider, to ask him if they could measure the impact of the Sprint and if he had anything to share about it in retrospect. To my surprise, he immediately accepted and recorded a video screencast to share some super interesting insights about the project. Sprint team, budget, ROI, collaboration with the team…everything. WOW.
We did the same with Sebastian, from digital agency Superhuit, who took over the final design and development of the site.
So for the first time, you can now see everything that goes on behind-the-scenes of one of our Design Sprints. Enjoy!
The video is in French, but lucky you: we’ve made some really nice subtitles
(take that Netflix).
The prototype made on Day 4: https://design-sprint.com/docs/stcc/#/j88aaig/screen/31713838
The new website redesigned from the ground up: http://stcc.ch/
Steph Cruchon is the founder of Design Sprint Switzerland Ltd and one of the pioneers of the methodology in Europe.
