As an executive, you’re always looking for ways to drive innovation, improve your UX strategy, and identify digital solutions for your organization. You may be familiar with design thinking, an iterative and collaborative approach to problem-solving. You might even be considering adopting the well-known 5-Day Design Sprint process.
The 5-Day Design Sprint can be incredibly valuable. However, it’s best suited for agile organizations seeking to address relatively narrow problems with a solid base of user research. Not every organization has the agility or user research to fully leverage the 5-Day Design Sprint. Larger, more complex businesses may require a different approach.
At UpTop, we’ve developed a UX Strategy Sprint process tailored to business organizations like yours. This highly structured, 8-week process reaps the benefits of the 5-Day Sprint while meeting your needs. It allows you to tackle bigger, more complex problems, like updating a legacy system or building a new member portal. At the same time, our process injects a jolt of velocity to identify innovative solutions and create an actionable roadmap quickly.
What Is the 5-Day Design Sprint?
Before we dive into the details of the UX Strategy Sprint, let’s take a quick look at the 5-day Design Sprint. This formal process moves a team of 10 stakeholders from defining a problem to user testing in five business days. Teams typically include a designer, researcher, developer, project manager, business executive, and business expert. Each day of the sprint’s five days has a specific goal, as follows:
- DAY 1: Understand the problem and define a goal
- DAY 2: Ideate on solutions
- DAY 3: Decide on a solution to prototype and create a storyboard for it
- DAY 4: Create a prototype of the solution
- DAY 5: Test your solution with actual users
This design thinking process may be repeated several times until a team selects the right solution.
As you can see, the Design Sprint moves quickly. This means it works best for agile teams already aligned around a narrowly defined problem, such as redesigning a specific user flow to increase conversions or defining a new product vision. In this context, a Design Sprint allows organizations to move quickly, thus saving time, money, and resources.
Applying this process to a large organization with multiple stakeholders can be challenging. Stakeholders may not have a shared understanding of the problem that needs solving, making the process more complex and difficult to navigate. It’s easy to see that the Design Sprint may not be the right fit.
UpTop Perspective
Not every organization has the agility or user research to fully leverage the 5-Day Design Sprint. Larger, more complex business problems often require a different approach.
What Is a UX Strategy Sprint, and How Does It Work?
Although it shares many similarities with the 5-Day Design Sprint, we’ve optimized our UX Strategy Sprint for large organizations. Rather than limiting the process to just five days, we’ve expanded our process to 8 weeks. We’ve found that this gives businesses the right balance of speed and structure to gain internal buy-in, align around innovative solutions, and solve more complex problems. The UX Strategy Sprint consists of the following phases:
Phase 1: Intake
Duration: 1-2 weeks
The intake phase is all about information gathering. We ask our clients to craft an initial problem statement describing the big-picture issue they hope to solve during the UX Strategy Sprint.
Next, we work to quickly get up to speed on our client’s main pain points and assess their situation relative to their stated problem. For example, let’s say a client wants to redesign their member portal to improve its usability. First, we would review and analyze the existing research, user data, and any other relevant information about the current portal. We would look more broadly at competitors’ member portals to understand the industry-wide benchmarks. We’ll also determine where our client currently sits within that framework.
Finally, we would round out our foundational insights with a UX audit of the existing portal and a sampling of stakeholder and user interviews. By the time we complete our intake phase, we will have a strong understanding of our client’s current state, including any technical and cultural issues that may be connected to the overarching problem.
Phase 2: Client Workshop – Diverge and Converge
Duration: 1-3 days
Now it’s time to bring together our core group of internal stakeholders in our client workshop. The workshop includes participant roles and activities similar to the 5-Day Design Sprint, inviting subject matter experts to provide additional insights. By gathering key stakeholder and user inputs before the workshop, we ensure that each voice is heard (even those individuals who are less prone to speak up in a group setting).
We hit the ground running as we share, discuss, analyze, question, and further define the problem. Together, we map out and finalize the following elements:
- Problem statement (this may be refined or even redefined as needed based on our findings)
- Personas and user profiles
- Journey maps
- Primary user task flows
- Other research findings from our competitive analysis, user and stakeholder interviews, and more
Once everyone is aligned on the problem statement and the current state of the digital experience (if applicable), we work together to identify high-value design opportunities and key areas of improvement.
We then diverge to individually ideate on potential solutions for each opportunity. Participants sketch or write their ideas and share them with the group. We also encourage them to bring inspiring examples from within (or outside) the industry. This participatory approach ensures that the team considers diverse views and inspirations.
Ultimately, however, we must decide on a course of action. To that end, we use exercises such as dot voting and impact versus effort activities to identify the most promising ideas. Often, we find a way to weave together several ideas into a single concept. We often land on a single idea or continue exploring multiple concepts.
Phase 3: Concept Design and Testing
Duration: 4-8 weeks
With the client workshop complete, we enter the final stage of our UX Strategy Sprint: concept design and testing. We rapidly design an initial prototype by synthesizing the information from the workshop. As soon as the client confirms that the prototype is in keeping with our vision and direction, we move into lean user research. At UpTop, we use a method called R.I.T.E. testing (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation). This accelerated process allows us to quickly refine our prototype towards an optimal solution with actionable insights derived from just 5 or 6 test users.
By the time we complete our UX Strategy Sprint, our clients can expect to receive a meaningful, mid-to-high fidelity prototype that has been user-tested. Additionally, we create a UX research summary document to help support the final design outcome. Unlike the 5-Day Design Sprint, our UX Strategy Sprint also yields a design and technical roadmap for implementation.
Is a UX Strategy Sprint Right for Your Company?
UpTop’s UX Strategy Sprint is tailor-made for companies that want to provide rocket fuel for innovation or navigate a major crossroads regarding some aspect of their digital programs. It can be used to envision (or reimagine) new or existing products and services, upgrade legacy systems, redesign a member portal, or innovate towards a clear goal that isn’t necessarily backed by a full arsenal of user research or even internal buy-in.
Want to learn more about how UpTop can help your organization unlock innovative new solutions to your most complex digital problems? Let’s talk.
