Five tips for running a remote Design Sprint
Ben Fraser, Interaction Designer at DWP Digital gives us an insight into what it’s like working for the largest government department and shares five top tips he’s learned to help you run your own remote design sprint.
I was recently involved in a 12-week Discovery project looking at improving the customer experience for citizens in receipt of multiple benefits. As part of a 9-strong team of both DWP colleagues and external contractors, my role as interaction designer quickly became focused on organising and facilitating a Design Sprint.
A Design Sprint is a 5-day co-design workshop, aimed at rapidly generating solutions to a business problem, with an emphasis on collaboration, solution sketching, prototype building and user testing. Initially outlined in a framework by Google, Design Sprints are now an established methodology in the user-centred design toolkit.
As an interaction designer with a varied design background – from an architecture degree to graphic design work, through front-end development and user interface design – I have facilitated Design Sprints and many other kinds of workshops in the past. However, never in a purely remote fashion. I knew it would be an interesting challenge.
We came out of the Design Sprint having identified some innovative solutions to business problems. Though exhausting, I thoroughly enjoyed planning and facilitating it, and I learnt a lot during the process. With that in mind, I’ve collated some tips I would have found useful to know before I started the process.
I spent several weeks planning, working closely with the rest of the Discovery team, in particularly the service designer. To start, we identified the key stakeholders we wanted to involve. Beyond the core Discovery team, we wanted to encompass the insights and experience of colleagues from across DWP. The Discovery’s product manager set about using her contacts to get different areas of DWP to suggest possible attendees.
We ended up with 12 core participants and 5 or so other passing contributors. I immediately ensured all involved had their calendars blocked out for the 5 days of the Design Sprint – not an easy task in this era of back-to-back calls! I had a rapid video call with the attendees I’d not yet worked with to introduce myself and to set expectations. This was particularly crucial for colleagues outside the digital sphere for who this kind of co-design sessions was unfamiliar.
The second focus was pulling together the relevant findings and insights so far to get people up to speed. We organised a set of lightning talks for the first day of the Sprint to help build a common understanding. This also included 3 speakers from outside the Discovery, covering topics such as accessibility and design for the digitally excluded.
It was clear from the start that many colleagues would have unavoidable commitments throughout the Sprint, so it was important to plan around these, particularly when it came to breakout rooms. Also, regular breaks are crucial in any Design Sprint, even more so in a virtual setting.
In order to manage everyone’s commitments, I created a spreadsheet to capture the participants, who was available and when. The planning of the schedule was done in basic note form – from my perspective activities rarely fit into neat 15 or 30 minute slots, so a spreadsheet doesn’t work very well. The planning of activities and time-boxing them was only worth doing in absolute detail for the first couple of days. As such, the precise plans for rest of the Sprint got vaguer as the days progressed. I focused mainly on an overall aim and output for each day which worked well.
I used an interactive whiteboard tool, and created a board per day as the focus for all activities. In the week before the Sprint, I created 2 other boards – one I called ‘Sandbox’, and the other I called ‘Intros’. I sent these to all participants, with instructions to use the former to familiarise themselves with the tool ahead of time, and establish that they could access it without issue. This worked well and mitigated against wasted time giving instructions or solving technical issues.
The second board then included some ‘intro cards’ and I invited participants to add a photo of themselves, their name and role, and answer a few informal icebreaker questions if they were comfortable doing so. In a remote workshop anything that helps personalise procedures is helpful.
On the first ‘ideation’ day, I asked all participants to attach something we could use as inspiration on the day’s board. We then started the workshop by running through these. I felt it added a personal touch to proceedings.
I had concerns about using Crazy 8s-type ideation activities without using pen and paper and sketching. Instead, I asked participants to spend a few minutes representing a hobby of theirs using the tools available: icons, importing photos, or even drawing using a mouse/touch screen. We then had to guess everyone’s pastimes. A warm-up, icebreaker and familiarisation with the tool all in one – really effective! Interestingly, many participants chose to simply describe their ideas using words when it came to ideation activities – which ultimately meant less ‘I can’t draw’ worries than during a physical Design Sprint.
You never know exactly what is needed for the next day until the current day is over. On the days of the Sprint, I organised a call with the project manager and service designer first thing to run through plans for the day. We had another ‘debrief’ at the end of the day’s activities to talk through how things had gone and help make final plans and tweaks for the following day. Unavoidably, this entailed a fair bit of just-in-time planning of precise activities and breakout room participants. In a physical Design Sprint, it is far easier to pivot as a facilitator – as long as sufficient wall space and Post-Its are available! It became apparent that a remote Sprint can be approached in a similarly nimble fashion – but that it entails a lot of last-minute work to adjust activities and artefacts to suit the unavoidable twists and turns. This needs to be factored into the planning and resourcing.
I also finished each day with ‘1 minute retros’ – giving participants an opportunity to feed back. These were invaluable, as some crucial housekeeping emerged, for example around keeping track of tangent discussions occurring in the chat panel, something that could easily be missed as a facilitator.
I certainly learnt a lot facilitating a remote Design Sprint for the first time. I hope some of these tips prove to be useful for any remote workshops you’re planning to embark on.
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