How to run a successful remote design sprint
Digitizing collaboration in midst of a pandemic.
Design is a highly collaborative practice, many of us are used to sitting in a meeting room with our colleagues, defining problems and writing ideas on sticky notes. However, many teams have found themselves working from home due to a global pandemic, and it’s predicted to become the primary way to work for many when this all blows over. So, what does this mean for collaboration and working as a team? Here are some tips for facilitating a successful remote design sprint.
Facilitation tips
1. Consider time constraints and plan ahead ⏰
Once the attendance list is confirmed, you want to ensure people are available to participate in the sprint. Be mindful of the team members who may have extra responsibilities while working from home, like watching their children. To do this, you should send out invites and hold a time slot in the attendees’ calendars 3–4 weeks in advance, and try your best to accommodate if needed.
2. Prepare the materials 📚
To facilitate any sort of workshop and sprint, it’s always helpful to prepare slide decks to explain the agenda and activities to the participants visually. This helps to bring everyone together in the same mind space. Using the decks to outline the sprint will also help you during the planning process. You can have a separate deck for each day of the sprint to better organize your materials.
3. Find a facilitator buddy 👯♂️
In bigger sprints, you might need to break up the group for certain activities. In this case, you’ll need to find a facilitator buddy(s) to help with leading each breakout group. Be sure to align on the right time to distribute materials (e.g. URLs to sharing collaboration boards), so that everyone stays on schedule.
4. Repeat, repeat, repeat 🔁
I learned this after facilitating several ideation jams and sprints, both in person AND remotely: to repeat the instructions 3–5 times. People have different attention spans, and it’s even more difficult to gauge over a video call, with people on mute, cameras turned off, and laggy internet. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself, ask people if they understand the instructions, and explain more than you think you need to.
The daily activities
Day 1: Understand 🧠
To kick things off, get everyone on a video call, like Zoom. Open the slide deck and share your screen with the attendees, and begin walking them through the agenda and activities. During day 1, a lot of sticky notes are involved for brainstorming activities, like long term goals, hurdles, journey mapping, and How Might We’s. To replace the real thing, there are many online collaboration boards that work perfectly for generating ideas with your team in real-time, like Google Jamboard and Mural.
Day 2–3: Sketching and Deciding ✏️
These two days mainly consist of sketching, which requires participants to prepare some materials such as papers and markers on their end. Make sure to communicate this to them prior to the sprint so they come ready. If the sprint team is too big, split participants into smaller breakout rooms, this feature is available on a lot of video conferencing tools.
To execute this, participants are given time to sketch their ideas and storyboards on paper, then share by taking and uploading photos of their sketches to a shared Google Slide deck. For dot voting, instruct participants to use the “shapes” tool in Slides and place circles on the ideas they want to vote for.
Day 4: Prototype and Hallway Testing 🔎🤔
Your team can choose their preferred prototyping tool: sketching on paper, Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD etc. Our team decided to create a mini “drag and drop” design system in Google Slides, using simple shapes and text boxes to create components, to allow team members without a design background to try prototyping. The team can then import the prototypes into a shared deck, and begin testing.
For testing, our team opted for hallway testing (also known as guerrilla usability testing), where you can test with people in the hallway. Although this is a quick and easy way to get feedback, it’s important to keep in mind that it should NOT replace User Testing.
The first step is to write down your research objective(s) and questions to ask your users, which can be done collaboratively through tools like Google Docs.
To test remotely, reach out to your colleagues via Slack or Google Hangouts, and ask if they’re available to hop on a call for a short prototype test. Within your sprint group, decide on a facilitator who will lead the conversation and ask questions, and note taker(s) who will observe and take notes of the users’ interaction with the prototype through the screen share feature.
Wrap Up
To wrap up the sprint, thank everyone for their participation, be sure to share the documents and provide the participants with a summary of the outcomes of the sprint. Don’t forget to let everyone know of the next steps for user testing.
Although we can’t meet in person, the creative process doesn’t have to stop. Running design sprints remotely also opens up opportunities as we can now leverage the tools to better record the process and results. From my experience facilitating remote sprints, I learned to get creative with the technology and tools available. Most importantly, remember to cut yourself some slack if things aren’t running smoothly, people will understand if your internet gets disconnected.
