How to Solve Any Design Challenge
I just returned from the Bay Area, after running a design sprint to help a company design a consumer friendly version of an enterprise employee portal in just 5 days.
If you’re not familiar with a design sprint, it is basically a process by which companies condense 3–6 months of design work into one week of focused problem solving exercise. Team members from different disciplines (engineering, product management, business, marketing, etc.) work together for 5 days to make decisions quickly and confidently, and to prototype and test new ideas cheaply and early.
A valuable byproduct of a design sprint is that everyone on the team learns the proper UX process for solving product design challenges.
I’ve used design sprints to help companies design and launch successful internal and external products, as well as my own products as well, and I highly recommend that you learn and apply that same process to design your products.
A design sprint is traditionally used to solve one challenge, or design a single user flow, in 5 days. In the next couple of weeks, I will show you how I’ve created a new design sprint to design an entire product in the same amount of time. Last week, we were able to design a web product, a mobile product, and a chat bot, when the company was hoping to do finish just the mobile version during that week.
Right now, I want to give you a quick tip that will help you and your team solve any product design challenges better and faster.
When the space in which you solve a problem expands, your thinking expands with it.
Teams (and individuals) are most creative, and most productive, when everyone is standing up, moving around, thinking out loud, using markers and paper to capture and share their ideas in the space surrounding them.
Solving problems that way enables you to use your whole body, as well as the entire space around you, to solve the challenge at hand. And when you place all aspects of your design challenge (user’s journeys, system maps, design flows, requirements, inspirations, ideas and sketches) on the walls around you, you can visualize the entire problem space in your heads.
Every time you need to solve a design challenge, or design a feature, you go to that part of the room where the corresponding user flow is placed, and you (literally) walk through the design process to get to the right solution.
Here is what last week’s design sprint room looked like on the 5th day. We ended up with more than 25 large sheets of paper capturing every aspect of the design process.
You can imagine how easy it was to come up with new ideas, and get consensus on design decisions, when everyone was walking around in that room.
If you want to solve any product design challenge, here are my recommendations:
- Find a room where you can be uninterrupted for an extended period of time. That period can range anywhere from 1 to 5 days.
- Close your laptop, and put your phone on Do Not Disturb mode. You can check your email and social media early morning, after lunch, and at the end of the day.
- Get some Sharpies, sticky notes, and large flip charts (I highly recommend using flip charts over whiteboards, because you don’t need to erase them every time you need to move to the next step, and you can go back and add ideas later to a previous step, which happens quite often)*
- Peel a new page off the flip chart, stick it on the wall, and start creating user journeys, writing ideas and sketching high level solutions on sticky notes of different sizes and colors, and place them on those papers
- Once you capture all your ideas on sticky notes, move them around and group them together, and draw relationships and flows between them
- When you’re ready to move to the next step, peel off a new paper, stick it next to the previous one, and start expanding your solution.
- Keep all your ideas and sketches on walls until you prototype, test, and iterate to reach the final design
- If possible, create a dedicated design (sprint) room, where you keep all ideas, sketches, inspirations, and flows permanently on the walls, so you can go back to them whenever you need to design a new feature, onboard a new hire, or walk someone through the decision process.
There is a special kind of creativity that happens when you use your entire space and your whole body to solve a problem, which doesn’t often come when you’re sitting down looking at a small screen. Next time you want to solve a design challenge, close your laptop, get up, move around, think out loud, and surround yourself with your ideas.
Ready to run a Design Sprint for a new or existing product? Drop us a line!
*Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn commission from qualifying purchases
