The Design Sprint with Roel Uleners
November 19, 2018
For the first Collaborative Design/Design Systems workshop of the year, faculty member Roel Uleners, led our cohort of first year students through a rigorous Design Sprint around a central topic, selected by the group on the first day.
What's a Design Sprint? Roel describes the process this way:
Take a small team, clear the schedule for a whole workweek, and rapidly progress from challenge to tested prototype using a proven step-by-step process. The goal is to collaborate, innovate with the user in the center, and accelerate the design and testing process as fast and real as possible. It's like fast-forwarding into the future so you can see how users react before you invest all the time and expense of building a real product or service.
The Design Sprint process: Map out the problem > Sketch solutions > Decide on what to move forward with > Create a high-fidelity prototype > Test it with real users
In our case, we had a team of seven cross-disciplinary students - and not five but only three days - to both learn about AND get a taste of a design sprint. The chosen challenge was to tackle the ineffective communication before, during, and after an emergency evacuation (as we'd seen with the Eagle Creek Fire last year). Rapid solution building got us seven concepts, which we vetted and ranked, and turned into one concept that we tested: the 'Time to Leave!' app
Great resources to learn more about design sprints:
