Hi, I'm art director Sato.

｢ Design sprint js" is a framework advocated by Google that performs hypothesis verification in a short period of time to find solutions for challenges.
It is a program to prototype and test the product in 5 days.

We had experience doing design sprints for our own services, but when we thought that it should be effective in client work, there was a very big learning.

Today, I want to share that learning.

Why We Introduced Design Sprints in Client Work

We produce e-commerce sites with client work.

I’ve seen many EC sites, but while there are a lot of e-commerce sites that have been slow to update due to the business of physical stores, I noticed that the success site staff is actively updating content in line with the world view of the site.

How do you make a site where the on-site staff are more involved?
Of course, I thought it was important to have an attachment that the site belongs to me as a prerequisite.

In order to do so, I thought that a design sprint that creates "what kind of site" while exchanging opinions with the whole team was effective and introduced.

Big Trend of Design Sprints

The design sprint takes five days as follows.

• Day 1: Background Understanding and Goal Setting
• Day 2: Diversion of ideas
• Day 3: Decision
• Day 4: Prototype
• Day 5: Verification

However, it may be difficult to keep the schedules of the parties involved in client work for five consecutive days.

So we spent two days in the process from “understanding background and setting goals” to “determining,” and arranged it into a form where prototypes were taken home and created, and then gathered together later for verification.

* A detailed stream of design sprints here

Is a Design Sprint Effective for Client Work?

One thing to note about this question is that there are projects in a design sprint that are not good for them.
And I found that it is also effective for client work in the case of suitable projects.

a design sprint project

○ If there are goals you wish to achieve or problems you want to solve, but if you want to consider the method for that while trying and making mistakes

unsuitable design sprint

× If the details of requirements have been determined from the beginning and there is no room for change
x When decision makers are difficult to get involved in a design sprint,

Lessons in Practice: Good Things

make the site selfish for one's staff

Design sprints are a great process of decision making.
It’s not a simple majority vote, it’s everyone doing the mock vote and then taking the process of decision making by the decision maker.

A successful project is said to be a project with “friendly dictators”, but in the design sprint, it is a flow of decision makers to decide after listening to everyone’s opinions, so even if the decision plan is different from their own choice, there is a feeling that they are involved in the decision making and this makes them feel different.

In fact, a staff member asked me the opinion that “I love the site so I want to raise it with care.

get both management and on-site perspective

Ideas come up from an equal position.
Furthermore, until the mock vote, each person’s ideas will be shared anonymously.

Both the management and on-site staff are able to carry out discussions without losing their perspective.

fast-paced

In a design sprint, the time spent on each piece of work is clearly defined.
So it forms at a much faster rate than the traditional process of creating and aligning proposals.

There’s a lot of learning to get the user to touch what works, so building prototypes quickly is a huge benefit.

Practiced learning: tubbing

sometimes i'm not used to making ideas.

I think that there are times when the members aren’t used to making ideas.
There was an opinion that "it was difficult to come up with ideas because I did not usually input it" in the impression of a retrospective.

It is likely that it will be easier to tackle if there are ingenuity such as searching for examples that may be useful beforehand.

If your idea is not chosen,

When it comes to deciding an idea, if you’re not accustomed to your ideas being chosen, motivation may drop.

Before voting on a decision, it would be good if the facilitator was able to take care of the main message that “not being chosen is not a superior or inferior idea.

Summary

We found that the client work design sprint was very effective in terms of speed, whether it is from a team building perspective where staff can self-organize their site or from various angles.

I couldn’t imagine how it would eventually be connected when working on each and every piece of work, but I was impressed to see it dropped into the storyboard.

There is fun in the process of creating, and it becomes a project that grows by being attached to the site.
Try a design sprint at least once.

If you're interested in creating an e-commerce site for design sprints, here Please refer to the page.