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Design sprints are a part of agile frameworks – it’s a time-constrained process that allows a product to undergo only a partial idea-build-launch-learn cycle. The most famous of the Sprints came out of teams working at Google Ventures, with iterations created by Jake Knapp and later published by Google Ventures in a book called “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.” The five phases included in the original design sprint approach include:
- Understand: Discover the business opportunity, the audience, the competition, the value proposition, and define metrics of success.
- Diverge: Explore, develop and iterate creative ways of solving the problem, regardless of feasibility.
- Converge: Identify ideas that fit the next product cycle and explore them in further detail through storyboarding.
- Prototype: Design and prepare prototype(s) that can be tested with people.
- Test: Conduct 1:1 usability testing with 5-6 people from the product’s primary target audience. Ask good questions.
from Matveeva, Maria (March 10, 2015). “Ask good questions”. Dockyard.
The sprint format was originally leveraged in 2019 for series of session to created nursing and health textbooks, facilitated by eCampusOntario. These sessions included moderators, subject matter experts, and health science communicators, working together over the course of a month, and meeting in person for collaborative working sessions. For more information, feel free to check out this video (“What’s an OER Sprint, Anyways | OOLN Community Webinar for some of the best practices and takeaways from the original run of sprints.
If you remember back to our Environment Scan section, you’ll recall that we recommended a de-prioritization of textbooks and large resources, with an eye towards the creation of smaller, ancillary resources that could be easily packaged and leveraged by instructors. As a result, we decided to scale down and modify the sprint format to make them smaller lifts for our participants and our facilitators.