Design Sprints for Online and On-Campus Visualization Courses
Johanna Beyer*

Hanspeter Pfister†

Harvard University

Harvard University

Figure 1: Different steps in a visualization design sprint. From left to right: map (identifying questions and audience), sketch (penand paper visualization designs), decide, prototype & test, present.

A BSTRACTWe present how we have integrated the concept of Design Sprints
and project-based learning into teaching a range of introductory
visualization courses. Design sprints describe a time-constrained,
interdisciplinary process based on rapid prototyping and testing withcustomers to define goals quickly, validate ideas, and decide on
a product roadmap before starting costly development. The welldefined, interactive, and time-constrained design cycle makes design
sprints a promising option for teaching project-based courses toincrease student engagement and hands-on experience. We haveadjusted the original design sprint method for teaching a range ofvisualization courses. This paper presents a detailed guide on how toincorporate design sprints into both large undergraduate and small
professional development online and on-campus courses. Design
sprint results, including quantitative and qualitative student feedback,show that design sprints engage students and are useful in practicing
and applying visualization and design skills. Finally, we provide
design sprint teaching materials, show examples of student-created
work, and discuss lessons learned.
1 I NTRODUCTION
In recent years, innovative pedagogical techniques such as active
learning and flipped classrooms have become increasingly popular
for teaching university-level courses. Active learning encourages
students to do more than just listen to a lecture. They become
actively engaged in higher-order thinking tasks, such as analysis,
synthesis, and evaluation [5, 18].
In the past five years, we have transformed our large undergraduate visualization course at Harvard University, with more than
200 students, from a lecture-centered course to a learner-centeredcourse [4]. We initially switched to an active learning model ofteaching in spring 2016 to make the class more engaging for bothstudents and instructors. We also included a single large teambased capstone project towards the end of the semester. Since
fall 2018, we have added design sprints into our visualization
courses to formalize how we teach a user-centered design process, teamwork [9, 17], and how to run team-based projects. To
date, in summer 2020, we have used design sprints in four courses
overall, including our semester-long visualization course CS171(www.cs171.org) and a two-day long visualization workshop for
professionals (www.dataviscourse.org). In total, we have used
* e-mail: jbeyer@g.harvard.edu† e-mail: pfister@g.harvard.edu

design sprints nine times on-campus and six times online for a totalof fifteen times in four different settings (CS171 and workshops, bothon-campus and online, respectively). Using active learning and aflipped classroom with in-class activities and multi-week team-based
projects leaves less time for content coverage. However, our students
gain more hands-on-experience and skills to apply their knowledge
in a real-world project, leading to a noticeable improvement in thequality of student projects.
Design sprints are time-constrained, interdisciplinary projects
that rely heavily on rapid prototyping and testing with customers
to quickly define goals and validate ideas [10]. Design sprints
originated from Google Ventures and focus on exploring businessideas within one 40-hour workweek. Compared to other strategies
for quick prototyping, such as Hackathons, design sprints follow
a clearly defined five-step process that starts and ends with users.
Design sprints have recently been explored in classroom settings [8],but to our knowledge, we are the first to explore design sprints
for visualization courses. We use design sprints in our courses toteach students visualization skills, a structured user-centered design
process, and the necessary skills for team-based projects.
In the semester-long courses, we use design sprints for an 8-weeklong guided project at the beginning of the semester and a 5-weeklong final capstone project. In the 2-day professional workshops, we
use design sprints for one guided project that lasts a few hours forthe online course and two days for the on-campus class. In addition
to adjusting the length of the original design sprint, which is one 40hour week, we have also emphasized the visualization components
at each step of the process. Furthermore, to scaffold design sprints
in our guided projects, we provide project ideas and cleaned datasets
instead of having students work with real users [6]. We let students
implement their own ideas, including choosing users and finding
data, for their 5-week long final projects.
This paper provides a detailed outline of how we conduct design
sprints in our visualization courses. We show several examples
of how to incorporate design sprints into different course settings.
Along the way, we will discuss common pitfalls and present several lessons learned. We will give guidance on how to prepareteaching materials, and we are freely providing our teaching materials on GitHub (https://github.com/CS171/design_sprint_
material). Overall, we believe that design sprints are useful andsuitable for active learning and project-based courses that prioritize
the hands-on-learning of visualization skills.
2 V ISUALIZATION D ESIGN S PRINTS
Our design sprints’ learning goals are twofold: First, we want students to practice the skills they have learned in lectures, labs, anddesign exercises through more substantial projects. Second, we wantto teach them how to conduct group projects using a suitable design

Theory

Apply fundamental
principles & techniques

Design Skills

Create, evaluate,
and critique vis designs

Coding Skills

Create interactive vis
in Tableau or D3

Design Sprint
Gain hands-on experiencein a visualization project

Figure 2: Learning goals. Design sprints allow students to apply theirknowledge of visualization theory, design, and coding skills to gain
hands-on experience in a visualization project.

process for bigger, independent visualization projects. Fig. 2 summarizes our learning goals. The design sprint combines visualization
theory, design skills, and coding skills, and allows students to learn
by doing. In our semester-long visualization course [1], we run two
design sprints per semester. The first sprint is guided and takes placein the last 20 minutes of each lecture during the first weeks of thesemester. This allows us to give students direct feedback in classand teaches students the design sprint process. The second sprint
takes place towards the end of the semester. Students work on thesecond sprint mostly outside of class, and hand in the result as a final
project. For teaching shorter classes, such as multi-day workshops,
we only run a single guided design sprint.
The original design sprint process consists of five distinct steps:
Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Test [10]. In the following, weoutline each of these steps and describe how we adjusted them to fit
our teaching goals and course settings. Figure 3 gives an overview ofour steps and the main visualization activities in each of them. One
main adjustment that we added to the design sprint process is that
we emphasize the importance of iterations in visualization design.
Therefore, we typically give students the option to refine their initialideas after having received feedback from peers and course staff.
Our courses also cover other visualization topics, such as perception
and color theory. Here we just focus on the essential elements forvisualization design sprints. For a complete overview of CS171 andour workshops, please see the respective websites [1, 2].
Design Sprint Preparation. Before starting a design sprint in anyof our courses, we first outline the format and, more importantly,
explain the motivation of following the design sprint process. This
introduction primes students for their projects. Next, we start with
our team formation process. For all of our guided projects, we
randomly assign students to teams to create diverse groups of students with different design and coding backgrounds. Additionally,in college courses, we make sure to talk about effective teamwork
and have students sign team expectation agreements that outline
their responsibilities, such as their method of communication, teammeeting times, and sharing materials and code. We found that thisinitial team formation step is crucial for setting up a positive teamdynamic and prevents many issues student teams often face. Finally,
every team creates a process book, a shared digital lab notebook (weuse Google docs) that documents every step of the design sprint ingreat detail. Process books are part of the design sprint deliverables
and allow course staff to give direct feedback to all teams on an
ongoing basis, which is crucial in online courses.
Map. The first step in a design sprint focuses on mapping out the
problem space. Before this step, we introduce the user-centered
design process [12, 19] to our students and give them access tothe datasets they will be using during the sprint. Furthermore, inthis step, we introduce different data types (nominal, ordinal, andquantitative) based on Steven’s taxonomy [20]. In their teams, they
then focus on three main questions: What is the data?, What is thequestion?, and, Who is the audience?. In this step, students should
get a sense of their data and come up with questions about their data
to answer for their audience through visualizations.
Sketch. After getting a clearer picture of the problem space, thisstep exposes students to the ideation and convergence process bysketching possible visualizations on paper. Students individually

What is the question?
Who is the audience?
What is the data?

Map

Sketching
C.R.A.P.
Gestalt Principles

SketchWhat is effective?
Graphical Integrity
Keep it Simple

DecideBasic Chart Types
Maps
Dashboards

Prototype

Qualitative User Eval
Think Aloud Study
Re-Design

Test

Figure 3: The design sprint process (map, sketch, decide, prototype,test) and the main visualization-related activities in each step.

create sketches of visualization designs that answer questions about
the data that they have identified in the previous step. During thisstep, we also introduce students to sketching, the CRAP designprinciples [22], Gestalt principles [11], and basic color design.
Decide. In this step, students review all proposed sketches of theirgroup, critique them, and vote to pick the most promising designs.
They then combine the highest-rated sketches into a visual dashboard
design. During this step, we discuss visual effectiveness [14], Tufte’s
principles of graphical integrity and design [21], and when it is okay
to break those design guidelines.
Prototype. In this step, students prototype their visualization designs using Tableau in our guided projects or D3 in our final projects,
respectively. We discuss basic chart types to visualize comparisons,trends, distributions, and correlations during this step. We also
discuss the basic map visualizations.
Before this step, we make sure that students are sufficiently competent using prototyping tools. In our on-campus courses, we introduce Tableau and teach students to implement basic chart types andmaps. In CS171, we use self-guided weekly programming labs toteach students the basics of web programming with HTML, CSS,
Javascript, and D3. Since we have students with varying levels ofprogramming experience, we adjust software or IDE choice basedon the students’ technical background. Students can also prototype
their designs using pen and paper drawings.
Test. This final step aims to have outside users test the teams’ visualization dashboards to collect feedback. Each group performs
qualitative user evaluation through a think-aloud study with students
from other teams. Students then analyze the feedback and comeup with possible improvements to their initial prototypes. For final projects, teams then spend another week implementing these
improvements. During this step, we present testing and evaluation
methods, including a live demonstration of a think-aloud study.
Wrap-up. Unlike the typical design sprint process, we have added a
wrap-up step to the CS171 design sprints. We ask students to fill out
peer evaluations to rate their own and their teammates’ performance
during the design sprint. If there are strong discrepancies between a
students’ self-evaluation and their peers’ ratings, we reach out to thestudent and discuss possible causes and remedies. During the guided
projects, these evaluations are formative. In contrast, they could
affect a students’ grade in their final projects. Since introducing peer
evaluations, we have to deal with much fewer typical team issues.
For final projects, this step also involves cleaning up the process
book, producing a 2-minute video, and presenting their visualization
dashboards in class. To add an element of suspense to the project
presentations, we hand out best final project prizes (chocolate) tothe top three teams as determined by the teaching staff. These prizes
do not influence students’ grades, but students love having bragging
rights and being added to the hall of fame on our course website.
3

C ASE S TUDIESThe steps of a visualization design sprint outlined in Sec. 2 stay thesame for all different types of courses we teach (e.g., on-campus
vs. online, large undergraduate course vs. small professional development workshop). However, we make small adjustments fordifferent courses to fit the course objectives and available time better.
In this section, we discuss several case studies of design sprints

assigned to be their main point of contact for questions or feedback
during the sprint. We have observed that allowing students to picktheir teams and projects leads to highly motivated student groups.
This has led to a wide variety of topics over the years, spanningfrom projects on obesity, to the war in Syria, to cryptocurrency,
and Marvel superheroes. Fig 4b shows a student project on theinterconnection of Marvel superheroes, and Fig 4c shows a projecton the topic of loneliness. Both projects were implemented in D3
and incorporated visual storytelling and multiple connected views.
3.2

Online Courses

We have also taught design sprints successfully online, both insemester-long courses and in two-day workshops. The main pitfall
in online design sprints is that students need regular and immediate feedback. Therefore, we schedule design sprint sessions to besynchronous and have teaching staff available to give feedback andanswer any team questions. One project mentor typically oversees
4-5 groups. In larger online classes, additional peer feedback mechanisms could be used. We slightly reduce the content for online
courses to consider that teamwork and group activities tend to takelonger in online settings. Especially the two-day workshop requires
careful planning and scheduling. We give students a clean dataset
and also allow them to work solely with pen and paper instead of
Tableau. This approach enables students without Tableau experience
to be highly productive in a limited amount of time.
4

Figure 4: Visualization design sprint case studies. a) CS171 guided
project in Tableau using US flight delays data. b) CS171 final projectin D3 about Marvel superheroes. c) CS171 final project in D3 about’Loneliness’. The left column shows student sketches, the right column
shows their final dashboards and websites.

performed in a variety of different visualization courses (see Fig. 4).
Our supplemental material [3] contains datasets, teaching materials,
and grading guidelines we have curated over the past couple of years
for our design sprints. We also include examples of student-createdprocess books in the supplemental material.
3.1

On-Campus Courses

Guided Projects in Tableau. We start our guided sprint in thesecond week of the semester. We assign students randomly into
teams, aiming for diverse teams in terms of programming and design
experience. We prepare project briefs for one to four different
datasets that each team can choose from for guided projects. The
project briefs include a dataset description, defines the audience
for the final visualization prototype, and states high-level goals.
Alternatively, we could let students define their audience and goals.
Each week, students work on one step of the design sprint anddocument their progress in their process book. Students should
complete most of the work during class time, but, if necessary, theyfinish their work at home. In class, several teaching assistants walkaround and give feedback to groups. Fig. 4a shows a design sprint
on flight delay data. The team created a dashboard to help casual
travelers minimize flight delays. The different views are linked toeach other and follow an overview-and-detail navigation pattern.
Final Capstone Projects in D3. The second design sprint is lessguided and gives students more independence. Students get to picktheir teams and have to find a topic and dataset they want to visualize.
Every week students have to submit their sprint’s current state andget timely feedback from their project mentor, a teaching assistant

D ISCUSSION AND L ESSONS L EARNED

Visualization design sprints are a powerful technique to allow students to gain hands-on experience in visualization projects. Thissection highlights our experience with design sprints, discusses common pitfalls, and reports on student feedback.
Overall Lessons. Design sprints allow students to apply what they
have learned in class immediately. This works very well in visualization courses where students can directly apply high-level concepts,
such as Tufte’s design principles, to refine their visualization designs.
Additionally, by using sketching and tools such as Tableau, students
do not need to learn more complex visualization libraries (e.g., D3)
before practicing their visualization skills. In contrast to typicaldesign sprints, we also stress the importance of iterative refinementin our visualization classes and extend the amount of time they havefor implementing their prototypes.
For design sprints to be effective teaching tools, students must
get immediate and direct feedback. We have tackled this problem
by assigning project mentors to each team that guides them throughthe design sprint and makes students aware of the strengths andweaknesses in their visualization designs. For example, in the 2-day
workshops, we read through each team’s project book overnight
and leave comments that students can address the next day. Being
able to track student progress in a shared process book is essential,
especially in the class’s online formats. Students also seem to likehaving a dedicated project mentor: “Having a project mentor is agreat idea –– my group learned a ton from our mentor!”
Student Engagement is High. We found that the optimal team sizefor design sprints in visualization courses is around 3-4 students.
This ensures that everyone is engaged, simplifies coordination, andstudents will call each other out if someone is not pulling theirweight. We also found that our peer feedback mechanism further
helps in keeping student engagement high.
Project Quality Overall is High. In the previous lecture versionof the course, we noticed that projects would go wrong in the expected ways: teams missed deadlines, did not follow a structured
process [15], ignored lessons of good visualization design, andsome students were hitchhikers or couch potatoes [16]. With design
sprints, almost all of these problems went away. The clear and simple process makes it easier for students to know what is expectedfrom them each week, and there is less risk of students falling behind.

We also found it helpful to share good examples from previous years(i.e., process books and prototypes) with students.
Finally, adding a small element of competition to the design
sprint (i.e., a ’best project award’) is appreciated by our students andour teaching fellows. Students want to beef up their resume, andteaching fellows also take pride in mentoring the winning team, sothey are more involved during the design sprint.
Lessons for Online Teaching. An essential difference in online
teaching is that students feel less connected and, therefore, clear
communication is even more critical than in on-campus settings.
That means that everything needs to be clearly explained and documented plenty of time ahead. For example, we clearly communicate
how teams will be assembled, when and how teams are expected tomeet, and we explain each step and milestone in the design sprint
process. This allows online students to plan ahead and reduces
student anxiety. Networking does not work as well in online settings. Therefore, proper asynchronous communication channels(e.g., Slack or Piazza) are essential to connect students and teaching
staff. To avoid overwhelming students, we limit the number of different collaborative tools we use and provide usage instructions foreach tool. We mainly use Google docs for collaboration and only
introduce additional tools if they add a significant benefit that cannot
be achieved by video conferencing and Google docs alone.
Short Online Courses. An important consideration for short (i.e.,single-, or multi-day) online courses is the necessity for strict time
management. Team activities and giving feedback online takes
longer than in person. We found it challenging to fit a Tableau-based
design sprint into our two-day online workshop. A better alternative
might be to just use pen and paper prototyping in those scenarios.
We also found that the busy schedule of online workshop participants makes it hard for them to complete homework before andduring the course. This makes timely and continuous feedback
throughout the course even more vital. We also found it crucial tohave technical support staff to manage our online video conferencing
tool, set up breakout rooms. and help students with technical issues.
Student feedback. Students have overwhelmingly liked our design
sprints. In particular, the final project is the favorite part of the course
for many students. We have received feedback such as “The final
group project was a great way to combine all the skills you learned
throughout the semester and turn it into some complex visualizations
about real issues and topics, which is something great to be added
to a portfolio.” and “The final project especially showed me that
I’m capable of creating unique visualizations from just the simple
building blocks of D3 shapes and areas”.
When we originally switched our large undergraduate on-campus
class of roughly 200 students to active learning in 2016, our student
evaluation (Q scores) increased by 0.8 points to 3.8 (out of 5) compared to the earlier lecture-based course, which had a maximum Q
Score of 3.0. With the switch to design sprints in 2018, the Q Score
of CS171 has increased another 0.4 points to 4.17 out of 5. Morespecifically, on a 5-point Likert scale, 72% of all students agreed
or strongly agreed that the guided design sprint helped them learn
how to apply visualization principles and a structured design process.
77% of all students agreed or strongly agreed that using Tableau in
the guided sprint allowed them to focus on good visualization designand visual effectiveness early on.
5

C ONCLUSIONS

We will continue to use design sprints in our visualization courses,
both online and in person. We believe that design sprints are an
excellent technique for students to gain hands-on experience invisualization design. We distinguish between guided design sprints,
that are performed mainly during class time, and more independent
sprints that can serve as a final capstone project. For our guided
design sprints, we use Tableau but might switch to an all sketchingapproach for shorter classes and workshops.

We have noticed that design sprints lead to projects that adhere
more closely to good visualization design principles, but often at thecost of less creative and more uniform looking projects. We believethat this is not necessarily due to design sprints but instead fromstudents internalizing and applying effective visualization designprinciples. Different visualization tools certainly also influence
the diversity of student solutions. We counter this by explicitly
encouraging students to come up with novel visual designs andby teaching them how to implement more creative ideas in theirchosen visualization software or library. We also plan to emphasize
more playful approaches to visualization, such as the “Dear Data”
project [13] or the work of Nadie Bremer [7], in future courses.
Finally, design sprints are not just more engaging for students;
they are also fun for instructors and teaching staff. They have madeour teaching more rewarding, and we believe that design sprints will
benefit visualization courses at other institutions.
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