Sprinting for Answers: A Design Thinking Exercise
Being creative is hard. There are moments in a creative’s career where we become stuck and unsure of how to best connect with our audience. This is why incorporating exercises like doodling, mind-mapping, and design sprinting comes in handy.
What is the Design Sprint?
This week I decided to work my creative muscles and go on a design sprint. This was not creating posters and crafting content, but rather a practice of design thinking. The purpose of this activity is to follow the process of defining, ideating, deciding, prototyping, and testing, with low stakes involved. The objective is to design a solution for an existing problem.
I recommend having a partner for this exercise, as they can serve as a practice “client” or “audience” and allow you to get a sense of the problem. To make things easier for my design sprint, I chose one of my classmates.
The positioning statement I chose for this particular design sprint was:
Improve the educational experience at Quinnipiac University
Seems simple enough.
Defining
The first step was to define the problem. To do this, I asked my partner a series of questions, over multiple short interviews. The idea here is to identify what the problem is and narrow it to be as specific as possible. Some of my questions included:
Do any specific issues come to mind?
Do you enjoy school at Quinnipiac?
How can Quinnipiac make it easier for people to switch majors?
The problem I found from my partner, was that Quinnipiac does not make all of their programs well known to students. This prevents students from unlocking their potential and increases the likeliness of them settling into a major that they don’t enjoy.
Remember, your notes do not have to be perfectly written. For many of the answers, I tried to use the exact words of my partner and capture their voice. I felt that this would help later on when deciding on the best solution.
Ideate
The next phase of the sprint is to search for and conceptualize relevant solutions. This is an acceleration point in your sprint. Brainstorm and generate your ideas as quickly as possible, even if they don’t completely make sense. Whatever you can come up with, be sure to jot it down or sketch it.
From my ideation, I narrowed it down to my top 3 concepts. These included:
A “What’s Your School” / “What’s Your Major” QU Survey
Tabling events showcasing each Quinnipiac school and its programs.
A brochure that is sent out to parents and students outlining what every QU school offers.
Decide
After my ideation, it was time to come back together with my partner and discuss. I explained each idea without trying to sway them in one direction or another. By the end of the discussion, they decided that the survey would be best to solve their problem.
Prototype
As a UI designer, prototyping an online survey was exciting to me. Of course, I only had a few minutes to draw up my wireframes, because once again this is a sprint. However, the end result was detailed enough to convey the message.
I designed three screen interfaces. The first showcased an introduction page. This is where a user could choose what survey they wanted to take. The next screen detailed the questions and answer options. In the last wireframe, a congratulations or success notification would pop up followed by the survey results.
Test
Finally, the testing phase enabled me to present my final prototype. Through some more discussion with my partner, I was able to adjust the prototype to better fit their needs. This phase allowed me to make final modifications before the sprint was complete.
In the end, I came out with a functional solution to my partner’s problem. By using empathy to define, decide, prototype, and test, the final product was directly effective in fulfilling their needs.
Final Comments
The design sprint allows participants to work their creative muscles and foster innovative solutions. As I navigated this exercise, I realized that each step held equal importance to getting me to that final product. I encourage all thinkers to give this activity a try, as it unlocks to potential for human-centered problem-solving and sparks an appreciation for the creative process.
Hi! My name is Kristin Ardese and I am a professional Graphic Designer and Marketing Strategist. I hope that by sharing some of my expertise, I can help offer valuable insights and build an engaging community.
