Research, Existing Data and Lightning Talks
Collect or Conduct User Research
Doing exploratory research before your Design Sprint can be helpful when approaching a completely new idea or project. If you’re sprinting on an existing product or process, evaluative research beforehand can also help your team identify key areas of focus. Ideally, you’ll have a full-time researcher on your team. If not, you may need to be scrappy and have another member of your team do this.
The first question that should be asked when planning a Sprint is what do you know about your users, and do you have enough research to inform the Design Sprint. Collect all of your research in one place. Then, review the existing materials and research for gaps in knowledge about users or the problem area. From there, assess whether or not you need to conduct more research prior to the Design Sprint.
There are many different research methods out there, depending on what you are trying to learn, they might include a Survey, Interviews, Diary Studies or Participant Observation or any other methods that will help you understand your users better. This content will then be brought to the Understand phase in the form of Lightning talks to help inform your ideation. This will the whole team develop a shared sense of target users, key metrics, and challenges or pain points to solve for in the sprint.
Learnings from research before the sprint can be distilled in the Understand phase as lightning talks and/or team reviews of data. This will ensure the whole team has a shared sense of target users, key metrics, and challenges or pain points to solve for in the sprint.
Plan Lightning Talks in Advance
The first day of your Design Sprint will include Lightning Talks, which require preparation ahead of time. Inviting key team members to lead Lightning Talks empowers them to have a voice and builds a sense of ownership over the Design Sprint’s outcome. Also consider speakers who are external experts and can introduce fresh perspectives.
Lightning Talk topics can very from Sprint to Sprint. They may include a summary of research, a review of product performance, inspiration from other industries, competitive audits – any information that can define the problem space will help the team! Most importantly, lightning talks should be concise (10-15 minutes) so that information can be distilled and absorbed quickly by the team.
Remember: lightning talks do not need to be presented in person. Your speakers can join remotely. If someone is unable to join the sprint, but has important insights or information to share, schedule them to present in the lightning round.”