5 strangers on a remote… Design Sprint!

Remote design sprints aren’t exactly a novelty as the new normal (read COVID pandemic) quickly brought sophisticated ways of remote collaboration to our daily lives. But going through such an intensive journey with 4 strangers who live thousands of kilometers from each other could sound as a big mess — It actually went great and here is why.

This semester* (*from the MSc Interaction Design program jointly offered by Tallinn University and Cyprus University of Technology) there was yet another design adventure. For the course Interaction Design Project we were given a wicked COVID design challenge to be tackled through a design sprint. This sprint would be conducted 100% remotely using digital tools, together with 4 other students, all located in different countries and in 3 different time zones.

Given the context of our assignment, each day of the traditional sprint (a typical design sprint takes place during 5 sessions, from Monday to Friday) took place during a two-week period. We had a total of 5 periods during the semester from September until December. Of course we didn’t work for two weeks on a row — that would be a marathon, not a sprint. Instead, we booked two sessions for each of these periods, each session lasting about two hours.

You can totally adapt your sprint length according to your context. Some sprints can take months, while others a couple of hours. All depends of the resources at your disposal and what you are you aiming to achieve with your sprint. The most popular formats in an industry-context range from 2 to 5 consecutive days.

We couldn’t have done it without a good arsenal of super cool tools that helped us staying connected with each other, host video meetings, collaborate, run ice-break sessions or design quick prototypes. These will be undoubtedly your best friends when running a remote design sprint.

Generally speaking, things were done by the book. And I it mean literally: we sticked to the famous Jake Knapp’s ‘Sprint’, combined with the official Remote Design Sprint guide, which helped us adapting some of the steps to the remote digital environment. We also used the official 5-Day Design Sprint Miro template, where we collaborated during our live sessions, kept our work progress and planned for upcoming sessions.

Our tweaks (or why it worked so well)

Booking sessions ahead

When you run a long-length design sprint, booking your work sessions with other international participants can be a bit of nightmare. One of the things that assured the success of such a design sprint was our commitment to book sessions well ahead of time. At the end of each two-week cycle we would fill our availabilities on Doodle and find our matches for the upcoming work meetings.

Facilitator’s board

We also implemented a board for the Facilitator’s notes on our Miro board, not only because we decided to rotate the role of facilitator, but also because could easily miss important information between each session. Knapp’s book stresses the importance of constant note-taking by the facilitator, but we belive that this step further was extremely helpful to keep track of the loose threads.

Keep it synchronous

There is a tendency to run chunks of remote design sprints asynchronously. While it is indeed very tempting to do so for maximising time, I strongly believe you will miss much of your design sprint’s spirit. We run all our 10 sessions synchronously and the value we got from it was undeniable: live interaction allows ideas, discussions and decisions to flow much better and faster. The only exception we contemplated was the time in between our Thursday sessions, the prototyping phase. Here we had to dedicate extra time than our 2-hour sessions, so the group found it more feasible to work asynchronously. However, finding moments to synch our work was paramount, to ensure the whole team was on the same page.

Fuel that group spirit

Do you remember that part I said we were a group of strangers? Group chemistry was a very special factor for the success of our design sprint. We might have been lucky to easily get along with each other, but a key for that to happen was allowing ourselves to have fun along the process. Therefore, the time for chit-chat before each session, sharing episodes from our professional and personal life or doing a couple of ice-breakers on the start of our sessions was crucial to keep the motivation on and create a good team spirit. (Our group found GoogleJam to be great addition to the Remote Design Sprint toolbox).

Remote means more

COVID made — in the worst possible way — everyone familiarised with remote interactions and digital collaboration. This ended up making our work much easier when we hosted conversations with guest experts during the Understanding phase or when conducting remote user testing . I believe here lies some of the greatest advantages of remote design sprints: having easy access to people from anywhere in the world and making it much more appealing for participants to join user testing sessions from the commodity of their sofa.

Our biggest challenge

As you might be imagining a 4 month-long design sprint can’t be easy to handle. The length of the sprint was probably the hardest of all to manage. It implies a lot of coordination, discipline and strong team motivation. It’s true that in most scenarios design sprints take place during only a couple of days in a week. But I believe our experiment serves as inspiration for those who need to space out a design sprint in one month length or those working remotely with participants who never met each other before.

I guess what strikes me the most is that, as most things in life, one never really knows what is like before one tries it out. I have heard a lot and read about design sprints, but it’s only when you actually devote your time, energy and skills that you understand its power and grow as a professional problem-solver. You will surely be surprised on how much progress a small group of people can make in such a short time. And most likely you will have fun and make some friends along the way 😊