Design Sprints For Employees – Creating A Better Employee Experience
One Great Way To Improve Your Employee Experience Is To Make Use Of Design Sprints For Employees.
Design sprints is a process that has been gaining traction over the last several years. Similar to the design thinking process (which I’ve written about here), the process is mainly used to tackle problems that the user or customer are facing. With a few tweaks, you can make use of design sprints for employees.
You can quickly identify problems and shortcomings in your employee experience (similar to how you can do the same with an employee journey map) by using design sprints to define and ideate within a week.
Here Is What This Post On Design Sprints For Employees Will Cover (click to jump to section).
- What Is A Design Sprint?
- How Do Design Sprints Differ From Design Thinking?
- What Are The Benefits Of Using Design Sprints?
- How To Use Design Sprints For Employees.
- Conclusion & Next Steps.
What Is A Design Sprint?
Let’s go right to the source of where Design Sprints originate from: Google Ventures.
Straight From The Horse’s Mouth:
The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.
- They also created some blog posts breaking down each of the five days that you can view here.
- As well, they’ve written the book Sprint, which you can check out here.
How Do Design Sprints Differ From Design Thinking?
I’ve written about using the design thinking process for the employee experience (it is also one of our services for organizations), and I’ve always had a bit of a challenge explaining the difference between design sprints and the design thinking process.
How Do They Differ?
I found a great article that distinguishes the difference between the two:
Design Thinking vs Design Sprints, what’s the difference?
OK, so, if innovation is our reason for using a system/mindset like Design Thinking, then we need to define what Design Thinking is in the context of my food analogy. Design Thinking is a cooking class! In the cooking class you learn the general philosophies of cooking, how flavour works, which ingredients complement each other, how to prepare specific items (chopping onions, cooking meat, making a sauce).
The Design Sprint, rather than being a mindset, philosophy or toolkit is a specific step-by-step system for producing and testing ideas (often product/service/business ideas). In our food analogy, the Design Sprint is a recipe. It shows you exactly what ingredients you’ll need, what to do, when to do it and in the case of a larger kitchen, who should do what.
I hope that helps. Hopefully it doesn’t make you too hungry (which it did for me while reading it).
For another example, let’s look at a tweet from Nassim Taleb (I have recommended some of his books in my reading list for building better cultures):
The real difference in politics isn't the "right" vs "left" gradation but rather "Greek" vs "Roman".
+ Greek = puts theory above practice
+ Roman= puts practice above theory
Be Roman. Now.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 25, 2018
In this case, the design thinking process is more the ancient Greek approach, while the design sprint is more in line with the ancient Roman approach.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Design Sprints?
- Quick results. The “standard” format for the Design Sprint is 5 days. With the way the design sprint is set up, you can quickly dig in and make your tests and prototypes quickly. No need to lock yoruself in a room for months on end, only to come out and find you’re way off the mark.
- Prototyping. One of the best ways to quickly test if your ideas are working. The last thing I want you doing is doing design sprints for employees, only to emerge with nothing to show for it, or shoving something down people’s throats.
- Reduce risks. Getting quick feedback will help you determine if you’re on the right track, but the wrong train (to quote my high school math teacher).
How To Use Design Sprints For Employees.
Like I’ve written about in my post on using design thinking for the employee experience, or using a journey map for employees, with some tweaks to the process, you can turn the process inward to create design sprints for employees.
We’re going to need to break these down into each of the steps required, and the five days and what each day entails. I’ll provide links to some of the source material straight from Google Ventures.
That said, don’t be afraid to change things up if necessary (just because it’s from Google, it doesn’t mean you need to follow it like gospel).
As well, since we’re creating design sprints for employees, as opposed to something for customers, there are some differences or steps that are easier, or not needed as a result, which I will point out.
Assemble Your Team
Before you begin, you’re going to need the right people on your team, and the right challenge to tackle. Let’s take a look at what you need:
Your Team.
- Find a decision maker. The higher up and more decision-making individual you can bring onto your team for your design sprint, the better.
- Find a small group from various areas to pull from. Google Ventures recommends seven people or fewer. Some suggestions for people? People & Culture, UX Design, Marketing, Software Developer, Learning & Development. It will depend on your organization, but that’s a list to get you started.
- Find some drop ins. It’s going to be tough to have people in at all times, but you can have people drop in for an hour or two for some insights.
- Have a facilitator. Perhaps you might hire someone external, like Playficient?
Supplies For Your Battleroom.
- A whiteboard.
- Sticky notes.
- Markers and pens.
- Paper.
No Distractions!
It’s recommended to leave things that love to buzz (computers, phones, tablets) out of the room, allowing you have your greatest focus. Cal Newport has a couple of great books on the importance of minimalism and being distraction free to get the most out of your work (these are on my list of recommended books to improve your culture).
- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
- Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
For more on assembling your team, check out the article here from Google Ventures.
Monday.
Here are your main goals for Monday of your design sprint for employees:
- Start at the end and agree to a long-term goal.
- Ask the experts to share what they know.
- Pick a problem to solve in one week.
You can view the checklist for what Google Venture recommends here for Monday.
Setting The Long-Term Goal.
This is the reason that you’re running your design sprint for employees. What is the long-term goal that you’re hoping to achieve? What do you hope to get out of the experience?
Ask The Expert.
This is where you can differ from the checklist of the Design Sprint, since we’re doing a design sprint for employees, and getting feedback from customers will vary greatly in comparison in getting feedback from employees.
There are some things you don’t have to worry about, but there are additional hurdles that you have to go through as as result.
How Might We…
Straight from the world of design thinking (which I wrote about in my article about design thinking for the employee experience), the How Might We Framework (or HMW for short) allows you to reframe the problems as opportunities. For example, if you were looking at improving the employee onboarding experience with your design sprint, here are some examples that you can use:
- HMW build out the employee first day to ensure that they’ve made the right choice in joining our organization?
- HMW build out a buddy/mentor system for our organization?
If you’re looking for more inspiration on the employee onboarding experience, here’s a post I’ve written to look at 10 onboarding activities that your organization can do.
From there, you will vote on the suggestions, in which you’ll then have decided what problem you want to focus on. Remember, at the end of the day that the decider (whoever that may be), has the final say on things.
Tuesday.
Tuesday is the day that you focus on the solutions. Your main focus are as follows:
- Looking at current solutions and how you can improve them.
- Sketching time.
- Recruiting people for your test on Fridays.
You can view Google Venture’s breakdown and checklist for Tuesday here.
Looking At Current Solutions.
When I mean current solutions, we’re not looking just at your current solutions you have for your employee onboarding experience. You can look to other organizations as well with what they currently do.
That said, break down what you currently do on this front for current solutions on whatever step you decide to tackle on your employee experience.
What are some ways that you can improve with what you currently do? For example, if you’ve decided to use a design sprint to improve your employee onboarding experience, you’ll look at what you currently do for it, and think of ways to improve it. You don’t need a full fledged plan…just write an idea down on a sheet of paper or a sticky note.
I also mentioned that you want to look at what other organizations do for the problem you’re tackling. For example, if you’re looking to tackle create a better day one for new employees, you can think back to previous jobs that you had (assuming you had a good day one), or of other day ones that you’ve heard about.
I know we said no laptops, but now could be a good time to Google to see what kind of examples pop up. That said, be careful with some of these, for I find it very common for a lot of results that pop up only look at the typical large tech organizations (the FAANG effect in action) and only pulling from a very small subset of organizations.
FAANG. Source: Seeking Alpha
Sketching & The Four Steps.
No, I’m not talking about the Sketch app.
Let’s take a look at the four steps:
- Taking notes. Gather notes from everything that you’ve come up with so far.
- Come up with some rough ideas. Focus on the ones that you find the best.
- Crazy 8s. This one is a lot of fun. Take a sheet of paper, fold it twice to create eight frames. Sketch out, in just one minute a variation of some of your best ideas. One frame, one idea.
- Come up with a solution sketch. This is where you come up with a short and rough storyboard. We’re not looking for a Monet here. Just a rough sketch (and words) is what you need to focus on.
It’s ok if your sketch looks like the one on the right.
Recruiting Users For Testing On Friday.
As you’re testing internally as opposed to externally, this step is a lot easier when running design sprints for employees.
You don’t have to go out and recruit customers and users or entice them with gift cards (granted, if you want to give gift cards to employees for providing feedback, I’m all for it). You can go down the hall to let someone know you’ll want to get their feedback, or send out an email.
One of the drawbacks with design sprints for employees can be on the feedback itself. Customers tend to be more blunt with their feedback.
For someone working at your organization, they may be a little more hesitant to be fully honest and share their feedback. Hopefully you’re not an organization that suffers from that.
If you are? You have some things that you need to discuss and get out in the open.
Wednesday.
This is the day where you decide which solution(s) you want to focus on.
Why is solution(s) potentially plural? I’m not a huge fan of getting married to just one idea to test out. Why?
I’m not saying that you should prototype and test out five or more different solutions if you only have 2-3 that you really feel happy with, but don’t get married to just one solution.
As you are doing design sprints for employees, you have more time to focus on building solutions as you don’t have to spend at much time recruiting external people to test out your solutions.
With that said, let’s break down what to focus on for today.
You can view the Wednesday breakdown and checklist from Google Ventures here.
Decide On Your Solution(s).
You take all solution sketches that you came up with on the previous day and get them up on hte wall. You have a number of ways you can vote for them (as the checklist covers). I’m a big fan of giving people 2-3 stickers or checkmarks that they can place on an idea (one vote only for each), and then sorting through the winners.
Perhaps you have one idea that is the clear winner, and the only solution that you’ll be focusing on. Perhaps you may have a few that have received the same number of votes, in which you can try to test out multiple solutions.
If that’s not possible, you can always get the decision-maker to be the tie breaker in these circumstances.
Develop A Storyboard.
When you’ve made your decision(s) on which ideas to flesh out, you’ll now spend time creating a storyboard.
Here is an example of a storyboard for a user experience. Source: Medium
Again, don’t worry about being a Monet here, get your idea across. You’re looking at something that be around 15 squares, and about 5-15 steps.
Thursday.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers…
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
© Playficient 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Let’s go right to the source of where Design Sprints originate from: Google Ventures.
Straight From The Horse’s Mouth:
- They also created some blog posts breaking down each of the five days that you can view here.
- As well, they’ve written the book Sprint, which you can check out here.
How Do Design Sprints Differ From Design Thinking?
I’ve written about using the design thinking process for the employee experience (it is also one of our services for organizations), and I’ve always had a bit of a challenge explaining the difference between design sprints and the design thinking process.
How Do They Differ?
I found a great article that distinguishes the difference between the two:
Design Thinking vs Design Sprints, what’s the difference?
OK, so, if innovation is our reason for using a system/mindset like Design Thinking, then we need to define what Design Thinking is in the context of my food analogy. Design Thinking is a cooking class! In the cooking class you learn the general philosophies of cooking, how flavour works, which ingredients complement each other, how to prepare specific items (chopping onions, cooking meat, making a sauce).
The Design Sprint, rather than being a mindset, philosophy or toolkit is a specific step-by-step system for producing and testing ideas (often product/service/business ideas). In our food analogy, the Design Sprint is a recipe. It shows you exactly what ingredients you’ll need, what to do, when to do it and in the case of a larger kitchen, who should do what.
I hope that helps. Hopefully it doesn’t make you too hungry (which it did for me while reading it).
For another example, let’s look at a tweet from Nassim Taleb (I have recommended some of his books in my reading list for building better cultures):
The real difference in politics isn't the "right" vs "left" gradation but rather "Greek" vs "Roman".
+ Greek = puts theory above practice
+ Roman= puts practice above theory
Be Roman. Now.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 25, 2018
In this case, the design thinking process is more the ancient Greek approach, while the design sprint is more in line with the ancient Roman approach.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Design Sprints?
- Quick results. The “standard” format for the Design Sprint is 5 days. With the way the design sprint is set up, you can quickly dig in and make your tests and prototypes quickly. No need to lock yoruself in a room for months on end, only to come out and find you’re way off the mark.
- Prototyping. One of the best ways to quickly test if your ideas are working. The last thing I want you doing is doing design sprints for employees, only to emerge with nothing to show for it, or shoving something down people’s throats.
- Reduce risks. Getting quick feedback will help you determine if you’re on the right track, but the wrong train (to quote my high school math teacher).
How To Use Design Sprints For Employees.
Like I’ve written about in my post on using design thinking for the employee experience, or using a journey map for employees, with some tweaks to the process, you can turn the process inward to create design sprints for employees.
We’re going to need to break these down into each of the steps required, and the five days and what each day entails. I’ll provide links to some of the source material straight from Google Ventures.
That said, don’t be afraid to change things up if necessary (just because it’s from Google, it doesn’t mean you need to follow it like gospel).
As well, since we’re creating design sprints for employees, as opposed to something for customers, there are some differences or steps that are easier, or not needed as a result, which I will point out.
Assemble Your Team
Before you begin, you’re going to need the right people on your team, and the right challenge to tackle. Let’s take a look at what you need:
Your Team.
- Find a decision maker. The higher up and more decision-making individual you can bring onto your team for your design sprint, the better.
- Find a small group from various areas to pull from. Google Ventures recommends seven people or fewer. Some suggestions for people? People & Culture, UX Design, Marketing, Software Developer, Learning & Development. It will depend on your organization, but that’s a list to get you started.
- Find some drop ins. It’s going to be tough to have people in at all times, but you can have people drop in for an hour or two for some insights.
- Have a facilitator. Perhaps you might hire someone external, like Playficient?
Supplies For Your Battleroom.
- A whiteboard.
- Sticky notes.
- Markers and pens.
- Paper.
No Distractions!
It’s recommended to leave things that love to buzz (computers, phones, tablets) out of the room, allowing you have your greatest focus. Cal Newport has a couple of great books on the importance of minimalism and being distraction free to get the most out of your work (these are on my list of recommended books to improve your culture).
- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
- Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
For more on assembling your team, check out the article here from Google Ventures.
Monday.
Here are your main goals for Monday of your design sprint for employees:
- Start at the end and agree to a long-term goal.
- Ask the experts to share what they know.
- Pick a problem to solve in one week.
You can view the checklist for what Google Venture recommends here for Monday.
Setting The Long-Term Goal.
This is the reason that you’re running your design sprint for employees. What is the long-term goal that you’re hoping to achieve? What do you hope to get out of the experience?
Ask The Expert.
This is where you can differ from the checklist of the Design Sprint, since we’re doing a design sprint for employees, and getting feedback from customers will vary greatly in comparison in getting feedback from employees.
There are some things you don’t have to worry about, but there are additional hurdles that you have to go through as as result.
How Might We…
Straight from the world of design thinking (which I wrote about in my article about design thinking for the employee experience), the How Might We Framework (or HMW for short) allows you to reframe the problems as opportunities. For example, if you were looking at improving the employee onboarding experience with your design sprint, here are some examples that you can use:
- HMW build out the employee first day to ensure that they’ve made the right choice in joining our organization?
- HMW build out a buddy/mentor system for our organization?
If you’re looking for more inspiration on the employee onboarding experience, here’s a post I’ve written to look at 10 onboarding activities that your organization can do.
From there, you will vote on the suggestions, in which you’ll then have decided what problem you want to focus on. Remember, at the end of the day that the decider (whoever that may be), has the final say on things.
Tuesday.
Tuesday is the day that you focus on the solutions. Your main focus are as follows:
- Looking at current solutions and how you can improve them.
- Sketching time.
- Recruiting people for your test on Fridays.
You can view Google Venture’s breakdown and checklist for Tuesday here.
Looking At Current Solutions.
When I mean current solutions, we’re not looking just at your current solutions you have for your employee onboarding experience. You can look to other organizations as well with what they currently do.
That said, break down what you currently do on this front for current solutions on whatever step you decide to tackle on your employee experience.
What are some ways that you can improve with what you currently do? For example, if you’ve decided to use a design sprint to improve your employee onboarding experience, you’ll look at what you currently do for it, and think of ways to improve it. You don’t need a full fledged plan…just write an idea down on a sheet of paper or a sticky note.
I also mentioned that you want to look at what other organizations do for the problem you’re tackling. For example, if you’re looking to tackle create a better day one for new employees, you can think back to previous jobs that you had (assuming you had a good day one), or of other day ones that you’ve heard about.
I know we said no laptops, but now could be a good time to Google to see what kind of examples pop up. That said, be careful with some of these, for I find it very common for a lot of results that pop up only look at the typical large tech organizations (the FAANG effect in action) and only pulling from a very small subset of organizations.
FAANG. Source: Seeking Alpha
Sketching & The Four Steps.
No, I’m not talking about the Sketch app.
Let’s take a look at the four steps:
- Taking notes. Gather notes from everything that you’ve come up with so far.
- Come up with some rough ideas. Focus on the ones that you find the best.
- Crazy 8s. This one is a lot of fun. Take a sheet of paper, fold it twice to create eight frames. Sketch out, in just one minute a variation of some of your best ideas. One frame, one idea.
- Come up with a solution sketch. This is where you come up with a short and rough storyboard. We’re not looking for a Monet here. Just a rough sketch (and words) is what you need to focus on.
It’s ok if your sketch looks like the one on the right.
Recruiting Users For Testing On Friday.
As you’re testing internally as opposed to externally, this step is a lot easier when running design sprints for employees.
You don’t have to go out and recruit customers and users or entice them with gift cards (granted, if you want to give gift cards to employees for providing feedback, I’m all for it). You can go down the hall to let someone know you’ll want to get their feedback, or send out an email.
One of the drawbacks with design sprints for employees can be on the feedback itself. Customers tend to be more blunt with their feedback.
For someone working at your organization, they may be a little more hesitant to be fully honest and share their feedback. Hopefully you’re not an organization that suffers from that.
If you are? You have some things that you need to discuss and get out in the open.
Wednesday.
This is the day where you decide which solution(s) you want to focus on.
Why is solution(s) potentially plural? I’m not a huge fan of getting married to just one idea to test out. Why?
I’m not saying that you should prototype and test out five or more different solutions if you only have 2-3 that you really feel happy with, but don’t get married to just one solution.
As you are doing design sprints for employees, you have more time to focus on building solutions as you don’t have to spend at much time recruiting external people to test out your solutions.
With that said, let’s break down what to focus on for today.
You can view the Wednesday breakdown and checklist from Google Ventures here.
Decide On Your Solution(s).
You take all solution sketches that you came up with on the previous day and get them up on hte wall. You have a number of ways you can vote for them (as the checklist covers). I’m a big fan of giving people 2-3 stickers or checkmarks that they can place on an idea (one vote only for each), and then sorting through the winners.
Perhaps you have one idea that is the clear winner, and the only solution that you’ll be focusing on. Perhaps you may have a few that have received the same number of votes, in which you can try to test out multiple solutions.
If that’s not possible, you can always get the decision-maker to be the tie breaker in these circumstances.
Develop A Storyboard.
When you’ve made your decision(s) on which ideas to flesh out, you’ll now spend time creating a storyboard.
Here is an example of a storyboard for a user experience. Source: Medium
Again, don’t worry about being a Monet here, get your idea across. You’re looking at something that be around 15 squares, and about 5-15 steps.
Thursday.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers…
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
© Playficient 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
I’ve written about using the design thinking process for the employee experience (it is also one of our services for organizations), and I’ve always had a bit of a challenge explaining the difference between design sprints and the design thinking process.
![](<iframe loading="lazy" src="https://giphy.com/embed/3oz8xZvvOZRmKay4xy" width="480" height="254" frameBorder="0" class="giphy-embed" allowFullScreen></iframe>)
How Do They Differ?
I found a great article that distinguishes the difference between the two:
Design Thinking vs Design Sprints, what’s the difference?
I hope that helps. Hopefully it doesn’t make you too hungry (which it did for me while reading it).
For another example, let’s look at a tweet from Nassim Taleb (I have recommended some of his books in my reading list for building better cultures):
The real difference in politics isn't the "right" vs "left" gradation but rather "Greek" vs "Roman".
+ Greek = puts theory above practice
+ Roman= puts practice above theoryBe Roman. Now.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 25, 2018
In this case, the design thinking process is more the ancient Greek approach, while the design sprint is more in line with the ancient Roman approach.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Design Sprints?
- Quick results. The “standard” format for the Design Sprint is 5 days. With the way the design sprint is set up, you can quickly dig in and make your tests and prototypes quickly. No need to lock yoruself in a room for months on end, only to come out and find you’re way off the mark.
- Prototyping. One of the best ways to quickly test if your ideas are working. The last thing I want you doing is doing design sprints for employees, only to emerge with nothing to show for it, or shoving something down people’s throats.
- Reduce risks. Getting quick feedback will help you determine if you’re on the right track, but the wrong train (to quote my high school math teacher).
How To Use Design Sprints For Employees.
Like I’ve written about in my post on using design thinking for the employee experience, or using a journey map for employees, with some tweaks to the process, you can turn the process inward to create design sprints for employees.
We’re going to need to break these down into each of the steps required, and the five days and what each day entails. I’ll provide links to some of the source material straight from Google Ventures.
That said, don’t be afraid to change things up if necessary (just because it’s from Google, it doesn’t mean you need to follow it like gospel).
As well, since we’re creating design sprints for employees, as opposed to something for customers, there are some differences or steps that are easier, or not needed as a result, which I will point out.
Assemble Your Team
Before you begin, you’re going to need the right people on your team, and the right challenge to tackle. Let’s take a look at what you need:
Your Team.
- Find a decision maker. The higher up and more decision-making individual you can bring onto your team for your design sprint, the better.
- Find a small group from various areas to pull from. Google Ventures recommends seven people or fewer. Some suggestions for people? People & Culture, UX Design, Marketing, Software Developer, Learning & Development. It will depend on your organization, but that’s a list to get you started.
- Find some drop ins. It’s going to be tough to have people in at all times, but you can have people drop in for an hour or two for some insights.
- Have a facilitator. Perhaps you might hire someone external, like Playficient?
Supplies For Your Battleroom.
- A whiteboard.
- Sticky notes.
- Markers and pens.
- Paper.
No Distractions!
It’s recommended to leave things that love to buzz (computers, phones, tablets) out of the room, allowing you have your greatest focus. Cal Newport has a couple of great books on the importance of minimalism and being distraction free to get the most out of your work (these are on my list of recommended books to improve your culture).
- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
- Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
For more on assembling your team, check out the article here from Google Ventures.
Monday.
Here are your main goals for Monday of your design sprint for employees:
- Start at the end and agree to a long-term goal.
- Ask the experts to share what they know.
- Pick a problem to solve in one week.
You can view the checklist for what Google Venture recommends here for Monday.
Setting The Long-Term Goal.
This is the reason that you’re running your design sprint for employees. What is the long-term goal that you’re hoping to achieve? What do you hope to get out of the experience?
Ask The Expert.
This is where you can differ from the checklist of the Design Sprint, since we’re doing a design sprint for employees, and getting feedback from customers will vary greatly in comparison in getting feedback from employees.
There are some things you don’t have to worry about, but there are additional hurdles that you have to go through as as result.
How Might We…
Straight from the world of design thinking (which I wrote about in my article about design thinking for the employee experience), the How Might We Framework (or HMW for short) allows you to reframe the problems as opportunities. For example, if you were looking at improving the employee onboarding experience with your design sprint, here are some examples that you can use:
- HMW build out the employee first day to ensure that they’ve made the right choice in joining our organization?
- HMW build out a buddy/mentor system for our organization?
If you’re looking for more inspiration on the employee onboarding experience, here’s a post I’ve written to look at 10 onboarding activities that your organization can do.
From there, you will vote on the suggestions, in which you’ll then have decided what problem you want to focus on. Remember, at the end of the day that the decider (whoever that may be), has the final say on things.
Tuesday.
Tuesday is the day that you focus on the solutions. Your main focus are as follows:
- Looking at current solutions and how you can improve them.
- Sketching time.
- Recruiting people for your test on Fridays.
You can view Google Venture’s breakdown and checklist for Tuesday here.
Looking At Current Solutions.
When I mean current solutions, we’re not looking just at your current solutions you have for your employee onboarding experience. You can look to other organizations as well with what they currently do.
That said, break down what you currently do on this front for current solutions on whatever step you decide to tackle on your employee experience.
What are some ways that you can improve with what you currently do? For example, if you’ve decided to use a design sprint to improve your employee onboarding experience, you’ll look at what you currently do for it, and think of ways to improve it. You don’t need a full fledged plan…just write an idea down on a sheet of paper or a sticky note.
I also mentioned that you want to look at what other organizations do for the problem you’re tackling. For example, if you’re looking to tackle create a better day one for new employees, you can think back to previous jobs that you had (assuming you had a good day one), or of other day ones that you’ve heard about.
I know we said no laptops, but now could be a good time to Google to see what kind of examples pop up. That said, be careful with some of these, for I find it very common for a lot of results that pop up only look at the typical large tech organizations (the FAANG effect in action) and only pulling from a very small subset of organizations.
FAANG. Source: Seeking Alpha
Sketching & The Four Steps.
No, I’m not talking about the Sketch app.
Let’s take a look at the four steps:
- Taking notes. Gather notes from everything that you’ve come up with so far.
- Come up with some rough ideas. Focus on the ones that you find the best.
- Crazy 8s. This one is a lot of fun. Take a sheet of paper, fold it twice to create eight frames. Sketch out, in just one minute a variation of some of your best ideas. One frame, one idea.
- Come up with a solution sketch. This is where you come up with a short and rough storyboard. We’re not looking for a Monet here. Just a rough sketch (and words) is what you need to focus on.
It’s ok if your sketch looks like the one on the right.
Recruiting Users For Testing On Friday.
As you’re testing internally as opposed to externally, this step is a lot easier when running design sprints for employees.
You don’t have to go out and recruit customers and users or entice them with gift cards (granted, if you want to give gift cards to employees for providing feedback, I’m all for it). You can go down the hall to let someone know you’ll want to get their feedback, or send out an email.
One of the drawbacks with design sprints for employees can be on the feedback itself. Customers tend to be more blunt with their feedback.
For someone working at your organization, they may be a little more hesitant to be fully honest and share their feedback. Hopefully you’re not an organization that suffers from that.
If you are? You have some things that you need to discuss and get out in the open.
Wednesday.
This is the day where you decide which solution(s) you want to focus on.
Why is solution(s) potentially plural? I’m not a huge fan of getting married to just one idea to test out. Why?
I’m not saying that you should prototype and test out five or more different solutions if you only have 2-3 that you really feel happy with, but don’t get married to just one solution.
As you are doing design sprints for employees, you have more time to focus on building solutions as you don’t have to spend at much time recruiting external people to test out your solutions.
With that said, let’s break down what to focus on for today.
You can view the Wednesday breakdown and checklist from Google Ventures here.
Decide On Your Solution(s).
You take all solution sketches that you came up with on the previous day and get them up on hte wall. You have a number of ways you can vote for them (as the checklist covers). I’m a big fan of giving people 2-3 stickers or checkmarks that they can place on an idea (one vote only for each), and then sorting through the winners.
Perhaps you have one idea that is the clear winner, and the only solution that you’ll be focusing on. Perhaps you may have a few that have received the same number of votes, in which you can try to test out multiple solutions.
If that’s not possible, you can always get the decision-maker to be the tie breaker in these circumstances.
Develop A Storyboard.
When you’ve made your decision(s) on which ideas to flesh out, you’ll now spend time creating a storyboard.
Here is an example of a storyboard for a user experience. Source: Medium
Again, don’t worry about being a Monet here, get your idea across. You’re looking at something that be around 15 squares, and about 5-15 steps.
Thursday.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers…
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
© Playficient 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
- Quick results. The “standard” format for the Design Sprint is 5 days. With the way the design sprint is set up, you can quickly dig in and make your tests and prototypes quickly. No need to lock yoruself in a room for months on end, only to come out and find you’re way off the mark.
- Prototyping. One of the best ways to quickly test if your ideas are working. The last thing I want you doing is doing design sprints for employees, only to emerge with nothing to show for it, or shoving something down people’s throats.
- Reduce risks. Getting quick feedback will help you determine if you’re on the right track, but the wrong train (to quote my high school math teacher).
- Find a decision maker. The higher up and more decision-making individual you can bring onto your team for your design sprint, the better.
- Find a small group from various areas to pull from. Google Ventures recommends seven people or fewer. Some suggestions for people? People & Culture, UX Design, Marketing, Software Developer, Learning & Development. It will depend on your organization, but that’s a list to get you started.
- Find some drop ins. It’s going to be tough to have people in at all times, but you can have people drop in for an hour or two for some insights.
- Have a facilitator. Perhaps you might hire someone external, like Playficient?
- A whiteboard.
- Sticky notes.
- Markers and pens.
- Paper.
- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
- Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
- Start at the end and agree to a long-term goal.
- Ask the experts to share what they know.
- Pick a problem to solve in one week.
- HMW build out the employee first day to ensure that they’ve made the right choice in joining our organization?
- HMW build out a buddy/mentor system for our organization?
- Looking at current solutions and how you can improve them.
- Sketching time.
- Recruiting people for your test on Fridays.
- Taking notes. Gather notes from everything that you’ve come up with so far.
- Come up with some rough ideas. Focus on the ones that you find the best.
- Crazy 8s. This one is a lot of fun. Take a sheet of paper, fold it twice to create eight frames. Sketch out, in just one minute a variation of some of your best ideas. One frame, one idea.
- Come up with a solution sketch. This is where you come up with a short and rough storyboard. We’re not looking for a Monet here. Just a rough sketch (and words) is what you need to focus on.
How To Use Design Sprints For Employees.
Like I’ve written about in my post on using design thinking for the employee experience, or using a journey map for employees, with some tweaks to the process, you can turn the process inward to create design sprints for employees.
We’re going to need to break these down into each of the steps required, and the five days and what each day entails. I’ll provide links to some of the source material straight from Google Ventures.
That said, don’t be afraid to change things up if necessary (just because it’s from Google, it doesn’t mean you need to follow it like gospel).
As well, since we’re creating design sprints for employees, as opposed to something for customers, there are some differences or steps that are easier, or not needed as a result, which I will point out.
Assemble Your Team
Before you begin, you’re going to need the right people on your team, and the right challenge to tackle. Let’s take a look at what you need:
Your Team.
Supplies For Your Battleroom.
No Distractions!
It’s recommended to leave things that love to buzz (computers, phones, tablets) out of the room, allowing you have your greatest focus. Cal Newport has a couple of great books on the importance of minimalism and being distraction free to get the most out of your work (these are on my list of recommended books to improve your culture).
For more on assembling your team, check out the article here from Google Ventures.
Monday.
Here are your main goals for Monday of your design sprint for employees:
You can view the checklist for what Google Venture recommends here for Monday.
Setting The Long-Term Goal.
This is the reason that you’re running your design sprint for employees. What is the long-term goal that you’re hoping to achieve? What do you hope to get out of the experience?
Ask The Expert.
This is where you can differ from the checklist of the Design Sprint, since we’re doing a design sprint for employees, and getting feedback from customers will vary greatly in comparison in getting feedback from employees.
There are some things you don’t have to worry about, but there are additional hurdles that you have to go through as as result.
How Might We…
Straight from the world of design thinking (which I wrote about in my article about design thinking for the employee experience), the How Might We Framework (or HMW for short) allows you to reframe the problems as opportunities. For example, if you were looking at improving the employee onboarding experience with your design sprint, here are some examples that you can use:
If you’re looking for more inspiration on the employee onboarding experience, here’s a post I’ve written to look at 10 onboarding activities that your organization can do.
From there, you will vote on the suggestions, in which you’ll then have decided what problem you want to focus on. Remember, at the end of the day that the decider (whoever that may be), has the final say on things.
Tuesday.
Tuesday is the day that you focus on the solutions. Your main focus are as follows:
You can view Google Venture’s breakdown and checklist for Tuesday here.
Looking At Current Solutions.
When I mean current solutions, we’re not looking just at your current solutions you have for your employee onboarding experience. You can look to other organizations as well with what they currently do.
That said, break down what you currently do on this front for current solutions on whatever step you decide to tackle on your employee experience.
What are some ways that you can improve with what you currently do? For example, if you’ve decided to use a design sprint to improve your employee onboarding experience, you’ll look at what you currently do for it, and think of ways to improve it. You don’t need a full fledged plan…just write an idea down on a sheet of paper or a sticky note.
I also mentioned that you want to look at what other organizations do for the problem you’re tackling. For example, if you’re looking to tackle create a better day one for new employees, you can think back to previous jobs that you had (assuming you had a good day one), or of other day ones that you’ve heard about.
I know we said no laptops, but now could be a good time to Google to see what kind of examples pop up. That said, be careful with some of these, for I find it very common for a lot of results that pop up only look at the typical large tech organizations (the FAANG effect in action) and only pulling from a very small subset of organizations.
FAANG. Source: Seeking Alpha
Sketching & The Four Steps.
No, I’m not talking about the Sketch app.
Let’s take a look at the four steps:
It’s ok if your sketch looks like the one on the right.
Recruiting Users For Testing On Friday.
As you’re testing internally as opposed to externally, this step is a lot easier when running design sprints for employees.
You don’t have to go out and recruit customers and users or entice them with gift cards (granted, if you want to give gift cards to employees for providing feedback, I’m all for it). You can go down the hall to let someone know you’ll want to get their feedback, or send out an email.
One of the drawbacks with design sprints for employees can be on the feedback itself. Customers tend to be more blunt with their feedback.
For someone working at your organization, they may be a little more hesitant to be fully honest and share their feedback. Hopefully you’re not an organization that suffers from that.
If you are? You have some things that you need to discuss and get out in the open.
Wednesday.
This is the day where you decide which solution(s) you want to focus on.
Why is solution(s) potentially plural? I’m not a huge fan of getting married to just one idea to test out. Why?
I’m not saying that you should prototype and test out five or more different solutions if you only have 2-3 that you really feel happy with, but don’t get married to just one solution.
As you are doing design sprints for employees, you have more time to focus on building solutions as you don’t have to spend at much time recruiting external people to test out your solutions.
With that said, let’s break down what to focus on for today.
You can view the Wednesday breakdown and checklist from Google Ventures here.
Decide On Your Solution(s).
You take all solution sketches that you came up with on the previous day and get them up on hte wall. You have a number of ways you can vote for them (as the checklist covers). I’m a big fan of giving people 2-3 stickers or checkmarks that they can place on an idea (one vote only for each), and then sorting through the winners.
Perhaps you have one idea that is the clear winner, and the only solution that you’ll be focusing on. Perhaps you may have a few that have received the same number of votes, in which you can try to test out multiple solutions.
If that’s not possible, you can always get the decision-maker to be the tie breaker in these circumstances.
Develop A Storyboard.
When you’ve made your decision(s) on which ideas to flesh out, you’ll now spend time creating a storyboard.
Here is an example of a storyboard for a user experience. Source: Medium
Again, don’t worry about being a Monet here, get your idea across. You’re looking at something that be around 15 squares, and about 5-15 steps.
Thursday.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers…
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
© Playficient 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Like I’ve written about in my post on using design thinking for the employee experience, or using a journey map for employees, with some tweaks to the process, you can turn the process inward to create design sprints for employees.
We’re going to need to break these down into each of the steps required, and the five days and what each day entails. I’ll provide links to some of the source material straight from Google Ventures.
That said, don’t be afraid to change things up if necessary (just because it’s from Google, it doesn’t mean you need to follow it like gospel).
As well, since we’re creating design sprints for employees, as opposed to something for customers, there are some differences or steps that are easier, or not needed as a result, which I will point out.
Assemble Your Team
Before you begin, you’re going to need the right people on your team, and the right challenge to tackle. Let’s take a look at what you need:
Your Team.
Supplies For Your Battleroom.
No Distractions!
It’s recommended to leave things that love to buzz (computers, phones, tablets) out of the room, allowing you have your greatest focus. Cal Newport has a couple of great books on the importance of minimalism and being distraction free to get the most out of your work (these are on my list of recommended books to improve your culture).
For more on assembling your team, check out the article here from Google Ventures.
Monday.
Here are your main goals for Monday of your design sprint for employees:
You can view the checklist for what Google Venture recommends here for Monday.
Setting The Long-Term Goal.
This is the reason that you’re running your design sprint for employees. What is the long-term goal that you’re hoping to achieve? What do you hope to get out of the experience?
Ask The Expert.
This is where you can differ from the checklist of the Design Sprint, since we’re doing a design sprint for employees, and getting feedback from customers will vary greatly in comparison in getting feedback from employees.
There are some things you don’t have to worry about, but there are additional hurdles that you have to go through as as result.
How Might We…
Straight from the world of design thinking (which I wrote about in my article about design thinking for the employee experience), the How Might We Framework (or HMW for short) allows you to reframe the problems as opportunities. For example, if you were looking at improving the employee onboarding experience with your design sprint, here are some examples that you can use:
If you’re looking for more inspiration on the employee onboarding experience, here’s a post I’ve written to look at 10 onboarding activities that your organization can do.
From there, you will vote on the suggestions, in which you’ll then have decided what problem you want to focus on. Remember, at the end of the day that the decider (whoever that may be), has the final say on things.
Tuesday.
Tuesday is the day that you focus on the solutions. Your main focus are as follows:
You can view Google Venture’s breakdown and checklist for Tuesday here.
Looking At Current Solutions.
When I mean current solutions, we’re not looking just at your current solutions you have for your employee onboarding experience. You can look to other organizations as well with what they currently do.
That said, break down what you currently do on this front for current solutions on whatever step you decide to tackle on your employee experience.
What are some ways that you can improve with what you currently do? For example, if you’ve decided to use a design sprint to improve your employee onboarding experience, you’ll look at what you currently do for it, and think of ways to improve it. You don’t need a full fledged plan…just write an idea down on a sheet of paper or a sticky note.
I also mentioned that you want to look at what other organizations do for the problem you’re tackling. For example, if you’re looking to tackle create a better day one for new employees, you can think back to previous jobs that you had (assuming you had a good day one), or of other day ones that you’ve heard about.
I know we said no laptops, but now could be a good time to Google to see what kind of examples pop up. That said, be careful with some of these, for I find it very common for a lot of results that pop up only look at the typical large tech organizations (the FAANG effect in action) and only pulling from a very small subset of organizations.
FAANG. Source: Seeking Alpha
Sketching & The Four Steps.
No, I’m not talking about the Sketch app.
Let’s take a look at the four steps:
It’s ok if your sketch looks like the one on the right.
Recruiting Users For Testing On Friday.
As you’re testing internally as opposed to externally, this step is a lot easier when running design sprints for employees.
You don’t have to go out and recruit customers and users or entice them with gift cards (granted, if you want to give gift cards to employees for providing feedback, I’m all for it). You can go down the hall to let someone know you’ll want to get their feedback, or send out an email.
One of the drawbacks with design sprints for employees can be on the feedback itself. Customers tend to be more blunt with their feedback.
For someone working at your organization, they may be a little more hesitant to be fully honest and share their feedback. Hopefully you’re not an organization that suffers from that.
If you are? You have some things that you need to discuss and get out in the open.
Wednesday.
This is the day where you decide which solution(s) you want to focus on.
Why is solution(s) potentially plural? I’m not a huge fan of getting married to just one idea to test out. Why?
I’m not saying that you should prototype and test out five or more different solutions if you only have 2-3 that you really feel happy with, but don’t get married to just one solution.
As you are doing design sprints for employees, you have more time to focus on building solutions as you don’t have to spend at much time recruiting external people to test out your solutions.
With that said, let’s break down what to focus on for today.
You can view the Wednesday breakdown and checklist from Google Ventures here.
Decide On Your Solution(s).
You take all solution sketches that you came up with on the previous day and get them up on hte wall. You have a number of ways you can vote for them (as the checklist covers). I’m a big fan of giving people 2-3 stickers or checkmarks that they can place on an idea (one vote only for each), and then sorting through the winners.
Perhaps you have one idea that is the clear winner, and the only solution that you’ll be focusing on. Perhaps you may have a few that have received the same number of votes, in which you can try to test out multiple solutions.
If that’s not possible, you can always get the decision-maker to be the tie breaker in these circumstances.
Develop A Storyboard.
When you’ve made your decision(s) on which ideas to flesh out, you’ll now spend time creating a storyboard.
Here is an example of a storyboard for a user experience. Source: Medium
Again, don’t worry about being a Monet here, get your idea across. You’re looking at something that be around 15 squares, and about 5-15 steps.
Thursday.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers…
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
© Playficient 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
![](<iframe loading="lazy" src="https://giphy.com/embed/j2pWZpr5RlpCodOB0d" width="480" height="202" frameBorder="0" class="giphy-embed" allowFullScreen></iframe>)
Before you begin, you’re going to need the right people on your team, and the right challenge to tackle. Let’s take a look at what you need:
Your Team.
Supplies For Your Battleroom.
No Distractions!
It’s recommended to leave things that love to buzz (computers, phones, tablets) out of the room, allowing you have your greatest focus. Cal Newport has a couple of great books on the importance of minimalism and being distraction free to get the most out of your work (these are on my list of recommended books to improve your culture).
For more on assembling your team, check out the article here from Google Ventures.
Monday.
Here are your main goals for Monday of your design sprint for employees:
You can view the checklist for what Google Venture recommends here for Monday.
Setting The Long-Term Goal.
This is the reason that you’re running your design sprint for employees. What is the long-term goal that you’re hoping to achieve? What do you hope to get out of the experience?
Ask The Expert.
This is where you can differ from the checklist of the Design Sprint, since we’re doing a design sprint for employees, and getting feedback from customers will vary greatly in comparison in getting feedback from employees.
There are some things you don’t have to worry about, but there are additional hurdles that you have to go through as as result.
How Might We…
Straight from the world of design thinking (which I wrote about in my article about design thinking for the employee experience), the How Might We Framework (or HMW for short) allows you to reframe the problems as opportunities. For example, if you were looking at improving the employee onboarding experience with your design sprint, here are some examples that you can use:
If you’re looking for more inspiration on the employee onboarding experience, here’s a post I’ve written to look at 10 onboarding activities that your organization can do.
From there, you will vote on the suggestions, in which you’ll then have decided what problem you want to focus on. Remember, at the end of the day that the decider (whoever that may be), has the final say on things.
Tuesday.
Tuesday is the day that you focus on the solutions. Your main focus are as follows:
You can view Google Venture’s breakdown and checklist for Tuesday here.
Looking At Current Solutions.
When I mean current solutions, we’re not looking just at your current solutions you have for your employee onboarding experience. You can look to other organizations as well with what they currently do.
That said, break down what you currently do on this front for current solutions on whatever step you decide to tackle on your employee experience.
What are some ways that you can improve with what you currently do? For example, if you’ve decided to use a design sprint to improve your employee onboarding experience, you’ll look at what you currently do for it, and think of ways to improve it. You don’t need a full fledged plan…just write an idea down on a sheet of paper or a sticky note.
I also mentioned that you want to look at what other organizations do for the problem you’re tackling. For example, if you’re looking to tackle create a better day one for new employees, you can think back to previous jobs that you had (assuming you had a good day one), or of other day ones that you’ve heard about.
I know we said no laptops, but now could be a good time to Google to see what kind of examples pop up. That said, be careful with some of these, for I find it very common for a lot of results that pop up only look at the typical large tech organizations (the FAANG effect in action) and only pulling from a very small subset of organizations.
FAANG. Source: Seeking Alpha
Sketching & The Four Steps.
No, I’m not talking about the Sketch app.
Let’s take a look at the four steps:
It’s ok if your sketch looks like the one on the right.
Recruiting Users For Testing On Friday.
As you’re testing internally as opposed to externally, this step is a lot easier when running design sprints for employees.
You don’t have to go out and recruit customers and users or entice them with gift cards (granted, if you want to give gift cards to employees for providing feedback, I’m all for it). You can go down the hall to let someone know you’ll want to get their feedback, or send out an email.
One of the drawbacks with design sprints for employees can be on the feedback itself. Customers tend to be more blunt with their feedback.
For someone working at your organization, they may be a little more hesitant to be fully honest and share their feedback. Hopefully you’re not an organization that suffers from that.
If you are? You have some things that you need to discuss and get out in the open.
Wednesday.
This is the day where you decide which solution(s) you want to focus on.
Why is solution(s) potentially plural? I’m not a huge fan of getting married to just one idea to test out. Why?
I’m not saying that you should prototype and test out five or more different solutions if you only have 2-3 that you really feel happy with, but don’t get married to just one solution.
As you are doing design sprints for employees, you have more time to focus on building solutions as you don’t have to spend at much time recruiting external people to test out your solutions.
With that said, let’s break down what to focus on for today.
You can view the Wednesday breakdown and checklist from Google Ventures here.
Decide On Your Solution(s).
You take all solution sketches that you came up with on the previous day and get them up on hte wall. You have a number of ways you can vote for them (as the checklist covers). I’m a big fan of giving people 2-3 stickers or checkmarks that they can place on an idea (one vote only for each), and then sorting through the winners.
Perhaps you have one idea that is the clear winner, and the only solution that you’ll be focusing on. Perhaps you may have a few that have received the same number of votes, in which you can try to test out multiple solutions.
If that’s not possible, you can always get the decision-maker to be the tie breaker in these circumstances.
Develop A Storyboard.
When you’ve made your decision(s) on which ideas to flesh out, you’ll now spend time creating a storyboard.
Here is an example of a storyboard for a user experience. Source: Medium
Again, don’t worry about being a Monet here, get your idea across. You’re looking at something that be around 15 squares, and about 5-15 steps.
Thursday.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers…
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
© Playficient 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Here are your main goals for Monday of your design sprint for employees:
You can view the checklist for what Google Venture recommends here for Monday.
Setting The Long-Term Goal.
This is the reason that you’re running your design sprint for employees. What is the long-term goal that you’re hoping to achieve? What do you hope to get out of the experience?
Ask The Expert.
This is where you can differ from the checklist of the Design Sprint, since we’re doing a design sprint for employees, and getting feedback from customers will vary greatly in comparison in getting feedback from employees.
There are some things you don’t have to worry about, but there are additional hurdles that you have to go through as as result.
How Might We…
Straight from the world of design thinking (which I wrote about in my article about design thinking for the employee experience), the How Might We Framework (or HMW for short) allows you to reframe the problems as opportunities. For example, if you were looking at improving the employee onboarding experience with your design sprint, here are some examples that you can use:
If you’re looking for more inspiration on the employee onboarding experience, here’s a post I’ve written to look at 10 onboarding activities that your organization can do.
From there, you will vote on the suggestions, in which you’ll then have decided what problem you want to focus on. Remember, at the end of the day that the decider (whoever that may be), has the final say on things.
Tuesday.
Tuesday is the day that you focus on the solutions. Your main focus are as follows:
You can view Google Venture’s breakdown and checklist for Tuesday here.
Looking At Current Solutions.
When I mean current solutions, we’re not looking just at your current solutions you have for your employee onboarding experience. You can look to other organizations as well with what they currently do.
That said, break down what you currently do on this front for current solutions on whatever step you decide to tackle on your employee experience.
What are some ways that you can improve with what you currently do? For example, if you’ve decided to use a design sprint to improve your employee onboarding experience, you’ll look at what you currently do for it, and think of ways to improve it. You don’t need a full fledged plan…just write an idea down on a sheet of paper or a sticky note.
I also mentioned that you want to look at what other organizations do for the problem you’re tackling. For example, if you’re looking to tackle create a better day one for new employees, you can think back to previous jobs that you had (assuming you had a good day one), or of other day ones that you’ve heard about.
I know we said no laptops, but now could be a good time to Google to see what kind of examples pop up. That said, be careful with some of these, for I find it very common for a lot of results that pop up only look at the typical large tech organizations (the FAANG effect in action) and only pulling from a very small subset of organizations.
FAANG. Source: Seeking Alpha
Sketching & The Four Steps.
No, I’m not talking about the Sketch app.
Let’s take a look at the four steps:
It’s ok if your sketch looks like the one on the right.
Recruiting Users For Testing On Friday.
As you’re testing internally as opposed to externally, this step is a lot easier when running design sprints for employees.
You don’t have to go out and recruit customers and users or entice them with gift cards (granted, if you want to give gift cards to employees for providing feedback, I’m all for it). You can go down the hall to let someone know you’ll want to get their feedback, or send out an email.
One of the drawbacks with design sprints for employees can be on the feedback itself. Customers tend to be more blunt with their feedback.
For someone working at your organization, they may be a little more hesitant to be fully honest and share their feedback. Hopefully you’re not an organization that suffers from that.
If you are? You have some things that you need to discuss and get out in the open.
Wednesday.
This is the day where you decide which solution(s) you want to focus on.
Why is solution(s) potentially plural? I’m not a huge fan of getting married to just one idea to test out. Why?
I’m not saying that you should prototype and test out five or more different solutions if you only have 2-3 that you really feel happy with, but don’t get married to just one solution.
As you are doing design sprints for employees, you have more time to focus on building solutions as you don’t have to spend at much time recruiting external people to test out your solutions.
With that said, let’s break down what to focus on for today.
You can view the Wednesday breakdown and checklist from Google Ventures here.
Decide On Your Solution(s).
You take all solution sketches that you came up with on the previous day and get them up on hte wall. You have a number of ways you can vote for them (as the checklist covers). I’m a big fan of giving people 2-3 stickers or checkmarks that they can place on an idea (one vote only for each), and then sorting through the winners.
Perhaps you have one idea that is the clear winner, and the only solution that you’ll be focusing on. Perhaps you may have a few that have received the same number of votes, in which you can try to test out multiple solutions.
If that’s not possible, you can always get the decision-maker to be the tie breaker in these circumstances.
Develop A Storyboard.
When you’ve made your decision(s) on which ideas to flesh out, you’ll now spend time creating a storyboard.
Here is an example of a storyboard for a user experience. Source: Medium
Again, don’t worry about being a Monet here, get your idea across. You’re looking at something that be around 15 squares, and about 5-15 steps.
Thursday.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers…
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
© Playficient 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Tuesday is the day that you focus on the solutions. Your main focus are as follows:
You can view Google Venture’s breakdown and checklist for Tuesday here.
Looking At Current Solutions.
When I mean current solutions, we’re not looking just at your current solutions you have for your employee onboarding experience. You can look to other organizations as well with what they currently do.
That said, break down what you currently do on this front for current solutions on whatever step you decide to tackle on your employee experience.
What are some ways that you can improve with what you currently do? For example, if you’ve decided to use a design sprint to improve your employee onboarding experience, you’ll look at what you currently do for it, and think of ways to improve it. You don’t need a full fledged plan…just write an idea down on a sheet of paper or a sticky note.
I also mentioned that you want to look at what other organizations do for the problem you’re tackling. For example, if you’re looking to tackle create a better day one for new employees, you can think back to previous jobs that you had (assuming you had a good day one), or of other day ones that you’ve heard about.
I know we said no laptops, but now could be a good time to Google to see what kind of examples pop up. That said, be careful with some of these, for I find it very common for a lot of results that pop up only look at the typical large tech organizations (the FAANG effect in action) and only pulling from a very small subset of organizations. FAANG. Source: Seeking Alpha
Sketching & The Four Steps.
No, I’m not talking about the Sketch app.
Let’s take a look at the four steps:
It’s ok if your sketch looks like the one on the right.
Recruiting Users For Testing On Friday.
As you’re testing internally as opposed to externally, this step is a lot easier when running design sprints for employees.
You don’t have to go out and recruit customers and users or entice them with gift cards (granted, if you want to give gift cards to employees for providing feedback, I’m all for it). You can go down the hall to let someone know you’ll want to get their feedback, or send out an email.
One of the drawbacks with design sprints for employees can be on the feedback itself. Customers tend to be more blunt with their feedback.
For someone working at your organization, they may be a little more hesitant to be fully honest and share their feedback. Hopefully you’re not an organization that suffers from that.
If you are? You have some things that you need to discuss and get out in the open.
Wednesday.
This is the day where you decide which solution(s) you want to focus on.
Why is solution(s) potentially plural? I’m not a huge fan of getting married to just one idea to test out. Why?
I’m not saying that you should prototype and test out five or more different solutions if you only have 2-3 that you really feel happy with, but don’t get married to just one solution.
As you are doing design sprints for employees, you have more time to focus on building solutions as you don’t have to spend at much time recruiting external people to test out your solutions.
With that said, let’s break down what to focus on for today.
You can view the Wednesday breakdown and checklist from Google Ventures here.
Decide On Your Solution(s).
You take all solution sketches that you came up with on the previous day and get them up on hte wall. You have a number of ways you can vote for them (as the checklist covers). I’m a big fan of giving people 2-3 stickers or checkmarks that they can place on an idea (one vote only for each), and then sorting through the winners.
Perhaps you have one idea that is the clear winner, and the only solution that you’ll be focusing on. Perhaps you may have a few that have received the same number of votes, in which you can try to test out multiple solutions.
If that’s not possible, you can always get the decision-maker to be the tie breaker in these circumstances.
Develop A Storyboard.
When you’ve made your decision(s) on which ideas to flesh out, you’ll now spend time creating a storyboard.
Here is an example of a storyboard for a user experience. Source: Medium
Again, don’t worry about being a Monet here, get your idea across. You’re looking at something that be around 15 squares, and about 5-15 steps.
Thursday.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers…
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
This is the day where you decide which solution(s) you want to focus on.
Why is solution(s) potentially plural? I’m not a huge fan of getting married to just one idea to test out. Why?
I’m not saying that you should prototype and test out five or more different solutions if you only have 2-3 that you really feel happy with, but don’t get married to just one solution.
As you are doing design sprints for employees, you have more time to focus on building solutions as you don’t have to spend at much time recruiting external people to test out your solutions.
With that said, let’s break down what to focus on for today.
You can view the Wednesday breakdown and checklist from Google Ventures here.
Decide On Your Solution(s).
You take all solution sketches that you came up with on the previous day and get them up on hte wall. You have a number of ways you can vote for them (as the checklist covers). I’m a big fan of giving people 2-3 stickers or checkmarks that they can place on an idea (one vote only for each), and then sorting through the winners.
Perhaps you have one idea that is the clear winner, and the only solution that you’ll be focusing on. Perhaps you may have a few that have received the same number of votes, in which you can try to test out multiple solutions.
If that’s not possible, you can always get the decision-maker to be the tie breaker in these circumstances.
Develop A Storyboard.
When you’ve made your decision(s) on which ideas to flesh out, you’ll now spend time creating a storyboard.
Here is an example of a storyboard for a user experience. Source: Medium
Again, don’t worry about being a Monet here, get your idea across. You’re looking at something that be around 15 squares, and about 5-15 steps.
Thursday.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers…
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
Now we’re taking that storyboard, and turning it into a prototype.
The word prototype can be a bit daunting. What should it have? What should it not half? From their checklist on Thursday for the Design Sprint:
In this case, your customers are your employees.
What Are Some Tools You Can Use For Prototyping?
Of course, always feel free to use pens and paper. You can also make use of role-playing in this case when it comes to testing things for the employee experience.
Create A Trial Run.
Test out with your team with what you’ve come up with. If you need a script for some portions of it, come up with one.
I wouldn’t come up with a thorough script, maybe get your bullet points down of what you want to cover.
Friday.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
Now we’ve arrived at the testing day. Everything you’ve created over the last few days will now be tested about by employees that you’ve recruited.
Here are some things to help guide you in regards to testing your ideas…
Testing With Five Users.
Testing your solution(s) with five users is usually all you need to find out what works and doesn’t work with what you’re testing. Why is that the case?
From Nielsen Norman Group – Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
Ask Open-Ended Questions & Guide. Do Not Hold Their Hand.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how. When in doubt, ask open questions that start with these. We’re looking to figure out the thoughts and feelings of the user, and these questions are great for pulling out that information. Don’t ask leading or questions with a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
As tempting as it me be, if users are not going through your solution the way that you thought they would, don’t railroad them. You’re gaining great insight by seeing that there are some hiccups and shortcomings in your solution that need some re-examining.
Seek Out The Patterns & Winding Down.
Now that your testing is done, review all your tests and see what commonalities came up. What worked, and what didn’t work?
Review your goals and sprint questions that you came up at the beginning of your design sprint. Were you close, or way off the mark with what you came up with and the test results?
Were you able to find a pattern?
Conclusion & Next Steps.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
While I’ve broken down on what was laid out from the Google Ventures process, feel free to change it up.
Firstly, as we’re running design sprints for employees, there are a number of unnecessary steps that you don’t have to deal with as opposed to finding customers.
If you want to run everything here in two days, feel free to go for it.
Remember That You Can Also Get Feedback Right Away At Any Point.
You don’t have to wait until the very end of the process to show what you’ve come up with to co-workers. You can get their insights at any point in time. You just need to go down the hall and get some people to give feedback.
This way, you may catch things even sooner than before where you may be off the mark.
I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you thinking about using design sprints for employees.
Need some additional help?
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
