Design Sprint for distributed teams
Tags: Remote Work, University, Design Sprint, Remote Design Sprint, Steam

Introduction

During the fall term of the MSc Interaction Design course offered collaboratively by the Cyprus University of Technology and Tallinn University, I had the opportunity to participate in a remote Design Sprint session with my peers. Over the past few months, we engaged with Design Thinking methodologies and adapted a very popular methodology such as “the Design Sprint” by Jake Knap in an agile environment.

Running a fully remotely sprint was challenging, but enjoyable too. In this article, I will express my thoughts and overall experience of running a Design Sprint session in a distributed diverse team.

Snapshot of the interactive solution

The main challenge for us was to provide an innovative and engaging solution that fosters the participation of women in the STEAM workforce. Although the STEAM workforce is crucial to global competitiveness and professional success, women are vastly underrepresented in STEAM jobs and among STEAM degree holders.

The team

Working with people in a remote setting is very challenging. Our team consists of professionals from various time zones, different cultures, and diverse backgrounds. Despite the diversity of our team, we managed to collaborate evenly on this project. Of course, there were miscommunications and dissatisfaction sometimes, but this is expected even in experienced teams. One of the main learning points was to improve our group-work skills and develop our team dynamics.

A good practice to tackle miscommunications was to arrange a fixed day and time to meet. We met every Sunday to plan, discuss, and perform retrospectives of what went well and what we need to work on.

In regards to the roles, we split the responsibilities based on everyone’s background, experience, and skills, while each “day” of the sprint will be driven by another team member.

Agile approach / Tools

During our initial discussions, we wanted to decide the right tools for us to collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously. We concluded that Trello is a very flexible tool to use for our project management. We also use Miro for research, place thoughts, and ideas on our board. Figma will work the best, as we have the educational licences and we could work collaboratively at the same time on the same file. We also chose Google Platform to work on our presentation slides and for the interview guide. Other communication was held in Slack.

Collaborative tools for remote teams

Design Sprint

Design Sprints usually are conducted in five days, where on Monday the problem is identified, on Tuesday solutions are being developed, on Wednesday important decisions are taken, on Thursday a realistic prototype is being built and finally, on Friday the solution is evaluated. However, given that this is a project in an academic context we tackle the Design Sprint method to serve our timeframe. Each “day” would take two weeks to complete, so we were actually provided more time to research and review material and resources at a deeper level.

Monday

Setting a long term goal, identifying the problem, and defining our research questions were a vital part of our process. We took a stab at framing the questions as:

HMW get females passionate about steam subjects?

HMW engage young females to participate in STEAM-related subjects?

HMW encourage girls’ self-confidence when it comes to choosing STEAM-related paths?

Then voted on the ultimate impact we want our project to have: In 2 years’ time, we would like 50% more females enrolled in STEAM subjects in 3rd level institutions. We defined quite an ambitious goal, however, this kept us motivated to continuously research, produce ideas and solutions.

How Might We (HMW) questions

One of the most important activities in my opinion was the ‘Ask the Expert’ task. To approach the problem, it is vital to engage with our audience, understand their characteristics, lifestyle, values, and everyday problems they might be facing on a daily basis. Each of the members of our team had a one-on-one interview with a friend or relative. Due to the current circumstances of COVID 19, we were flexible to carry the interviews either physically or in an online setting. It is important to make the expert feel comfortable and allow them to express their thoughts freely, to get the most out of their experience.

Tuesday

The main goal of Tuesday’s activities was to ideate and produce as many solutions as possible. Many of them were innovative and crazy, but we concluded as a team to a solution that serves our main question and goal.

Initial sketches and solutions

During Tuesday, we learned to built upon other’s ideas to produce complex solutions and gain inspiration from observing each of the member’s references. This was a great opportunity to quickly transform our ideas into sketches and communicate within the team.

Solution sketches votes

Wednesday

On Wednesday, after the team members worked on a collaborative storyboard, we concluded on the final idea. Our app aims to educate young girls and to engage them with STEAM-related fields in a very fun way! Famous female STEAM role models take the girls on a magical journey. The users can learn about the life and work of each of the STEAM field’s representatives, play quizzes, earn coins and badges, and challenge their friends!

Most voted solution

There is the main dashboard, where the user can interact with their selected paths, view their earned skills and badges, and select their heroes. There is a leaderboard also to increase competition and engagement. We wanted to use famous role models who represent each category, such as Frida Kahlo, Hypatia, and Marie Curie allowing the users to relate to them.

We wanted to have a sense of narration in our app, so the user can learn about the character through stories and narrations.

Thursday

Thursday was dedicated to prototyping. I took the initiative to make some initial proposals and define the design language of our product. The brand colours were chosen carefully and were assigned to each category, which represents Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. The UI follows a minimalistic approach, but is friendly and gives the sense of a mobile game. Three flows were produced and stitched together in Figma.

UI look and feel

Friday

Finally, we made it to Friday! This was exciting and overwhelming too. This is the moment of truth. The moment where all the efforts of our team will pay off. We recruited eleven participants to evaluate our prototype. Most of the evaluation sessions were conducted remotely due to the limitations of the current pandemic. However, we were able to carry out one session in a physical setting. The session was recorded, so we were able to observe the user’s behaviour as she was thinking aloud while interacting with our prototype.

Conclusion

Through the process of inspiration, ideation, and implementation we were able to understand the population we are targeting, decide, sketch, storyboard, prototype, and test innovative solutions.

The overall experience from these remote Design Sprint sessions is good. I have deepened my understanding of how to conduct Design Thinking activities in an agile context. I enjoyed the collaboration between my peers, despite the miscommunication we sometimes had. Each of the members shared their knowledge based on their personal and professional experiences. This approach is most valuable and beneficial and I will definitely want to adapt it in my professional path.