I’ve been running design sprints for around 5 years but never a remote design sprint…. In fact I’ve always refused to even contemplate running them remote… If a company can’t or won’t go to the effort of getting everyone in a room together with a free calendar for 1 week… Then I generally decide that they're not serious about the process and say no! 

That was until 2020 and Coronavirus...  and whilst I still believe that running design sprints physically and co-located is the way to go… I also thought that getting paid to run a design sprint remotely was better than the alternative of no money and starving to death in the gutter! (mild exaggeration but you get the point)

So in August 2020 I ran my first ever remote design sprint! As is becoming more and more common the client had an NDA in place so I’m not allowed to mention any details or share any photos. 

I’ll assume that anyone reading is already familiar with the concept of Design Sprints - if not I have a slightly more in depth post Here I’d also suggest doing a Google for AJ&Smart and having a look at what they are doing in addition to the original Jake Knapp videos.

Preparation

In addition to the usual prep for a Design Sprint (Sending out questionnaires, welcome/explanatory emails to the team and several discussions with the ‘Decider’ - I scheduled an individual 45minute (online) meet & greet with every team member in advance and included a quick run through of the tools we’d be using to ensure they didn’t have technical problems logging on etc and to have a go using them in advance. 

I also setup all the templates in Miro and had a number of simple example sheets setup which I went through on the Meet & Greet.

Perhaps most importantly I brought a couple of lighting lamps for my office in a vain attempt to make myself look better on camera ;-)

Timings 

Design sprints are usually 5 days… However a few years back I shortened my offering down to 4 days and I kept the remote design sprint the same length - I also dropped a few of the activities I would usually do with the aim of reducing the length of each day and reduce the fatigue from a day of video conferencing.

Each day started at 9:30am (except Wednesday which is prototype day) allowing everyone to get any admin out of the way before the day commenced! With the aim to finish every day before 4pm (again except Wednesday which went on a little longer!

Monday - Map day

Introductions followed by some social ground rules for the week ahead. I decided to break with convention and ask everyone NOT to mute their microphones… This was a tip I picked up from somebody who’d done a course with Judy Rees on remote working. The idea of everyone not being on mute is usually a disaster! however I framed it as an experiment and all agreed to try, more on this later. 

And then the inevitable icebreaker…. Everyone was asked to go fetch something green and then show it! This was more about testing the technology (ensuring everyone's microphone worked!) and getting everyone to stand up and do something physical before we began.

Next the Decider gave a very detailed pitch and set out her goals for the week (everyone was on mute for this section) 

We then did the usual design sprint activities ‘postcard from the future’ followed by the map all done within Miro.

The afternoon was taken up with individual sketches - using either a design package or in some cases… pen and paper which were then photographed and uploaded.

Tuesday - Decision day

Tuesday morning started with a recap of yesterday, we revisited the Map and looked at the Pre-mortem (postcard from the future activities).

Usually when doing a physical Design Sprint - I have all the individual sketches pinned to the wall and we spend some time walking around (I usually play Vision on, Gallery Scene during this activity) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcCHRW8G9yY)

Being remote I couldn’t find a good way of reproducing this - so instead we went straight to each team member individually presenting and explaining/demonstrating their sketches.

Before starting the storyboarding - which can be a test for any facilitator! We did a warm up exercise identifying 6 process steps… which I blatantly ‘stole’ from AJ&Smart (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5pSBgQUezQ) Once we’d agreed (Or in our case the Decider decided) we used this as the basis for story boarding - and actually managed to finish the process in under 2 hours - I’ve never completed a storyboard so quickly.

Wednesday - Prototype day

This day is usually quite stressful, frantic and fun (or at least I like to think so) for the prototyping it was decided that we’d use Figma - It was a tool the client already used and is something I’ve been meaning to have a play with for a while - In theory Figma was a great choice, it's designed for collaborative, cloud based design and allows for prototypes to be shared via URL - prefect for the user tests the following day. 

However not everyone on the team had extensive experience of Figma (Something I already knew from the prep discussions beforehand)  - ordinarily when I have a team working together on the prototype this isn’t a problem - people tend to pair or mob up and work to their strengths.

The initial plan was to sit back and see if the team would organise themselves - I generally prefer this approach.. Not just because it makes my life easier! But as a rule of thumb the team probably knows each other much better than I do. However in this instance perhaps because we were remote this didn’t really work - So I organised the team into 2 teams of 4 and suggested an approach to tackle the screens/components which needed building… Most team members only had one screen at home so couldn’t use Figma, Miro and MS-Teams  at the same time - which slowed us down and people tended to get a bit siloed in how they were working, if I’m going to be honest this was all a little disorganised and as facilitator I probably lost control of it for a while and it’s something I need to rethink for my next remote design sprint.

Thursday - Test Day

Thursday was test day - we already had 5 people lined up for interviews… They had been picked and contacted prior to the design sprint starting and on Wednesday myself and the ‘Decider’ called each of them to debrief what would happen on ‘Test-Day’ test that the software worked (Whereby) - And to ensure that they hadn’t forgotten to turn up!

As our recruits were external from the client we couldn’t use MS-Teams - And instead we used Whereby.com - Whereby allows you to create a URL for a room which can then be mailed out.. And unlike some systems doesn’t require downloaded software or accounts to be created - And allows for screen recording. 

Usually when doing user tests I have a number of cameras setup including a document camera so we can observe how the user physically interacts with the system (assuming its on a mobile device) due to the limits of technology we were restricted to each user’s own web-camera so we could observe the interview but missed some of those great moments where a user’s finger hovers over the screen unsure what to do next! 

We again used Miro and virtual post-it notes to capture the feedback from the interviews.

Conclusion 

It seemed to work! We had a really interesting product and test day with lots of good feedback and the client was very excited and happy about the process!! 

Personally as the facilitator I found it very hard work, planning is essential (more so than running one physically) I felt the event lacked a lot of the energy that usually exists and many of those really insightful little side conversations that usually take place were missing! 

It was nice being home every evening!! And being able to nip to my own kitchen and bathroom! However personally I’m hoping we don’t stay remote for too long… I miss the excitement, energy and passion working directly with a team!

Oh… And lets not forget the experiment in having everyone NOT muted! I think it’s fair to say it received mixed opinions. As a facilitator I found it helped for ‘free and easy’ conversation and avoided those ‘I think you’re on mute’ conversations! We were also lucky that most of the team had quiet places to work with little background noise… However at times it did distract from who was speaking - in the end we did a mix of both… I think the jury is still out on that approach! 

What worked well

• The individual sketch (Monday afternoon) worked much better than usual - As an individual activity it was always going to be less challenging but I was surprised by how many ideas the team came up with many more than I usually see when working on site. This period also gave me a chance to have a 1 on 1 chats with each team member.

• As the entire design sprint was digital there was no need to capture drawings and the numerous post-it notes… everything was already captured digitally.

• Design sprints usually involve a considerable amount of stationary! Magic white wall, post its, sharpies, pens, paper! Being digital certainly removes the amount of materials used!

What didn’t work so well

• Broadband - I had my broadband decide to crash halfway through the first day requiring a router reboot! and my router takes what seems an age to boot back up. Usually I work with a second facilitator when doing design sprints and if I had this time they could have continued whilst I got back on-line… Unfortunately I was solo for this one! Fortunately my mobile came to the rescue allowing me to connect to 4G… Moral of the story always have a backup connection method! I also use a hardwired connection rather than WI-FI

• On-line tools - On the 2nd day Miro decided to freeze during the group storyboarding session - fortunately after a tea break it decided to start working again… If it hadn’t have jumped back to life we could have been in a bit of a mess! So again have a backup plan for when the technology fails you.. Which it will eventually 

• No Co-Facilitator - I usually have a co-facilitator when doing a design-sprint… partially because I don’t have a UX background (I’me of a techie) so I usually work with someone with strong UX experience - and they allow me to share the facilitation (they also pickup on my mistakes!) However for a number of reasons I wasn’t able to get a co-facilitator in on this gig - my advice would always be to get use a co-facilitator when doing a design sprint - and doubly so when doing it remote!

On-line tools I used

There are so many tools available but these are the ones I used :-

• Video - I would usually choose Zoom.. However this particular client had a number of restrictions in place including the use of MS Teams! 

• User interviews - For the user interviews MS-Teams was not an option - For this I used Whereby.com - A friend of mine introduced me to Whereby earlier this year and I was impressed by its simplicity to use - just generate a URL and send 

• Whiteboard - Miro, I think everyone is using Miro at the moment… And apart from hanging once it performed admirably

• Voting - There’s lots of voting apps out there… However being ‘old skool’ and wanting to reduce the number of applications in use I just used Miro - and rather than being fancy just used the ‘dot’ technique 

• Slide show - I’ve been using Google slides for years - However being remote and wanting to reduce the number of tools and switching between apps I put the slides within Miro 

• Prototyping - Sketch and Figma 

• Microphone - I have a Yeti microphone which claims to be production quality! It possibly is however unfortunately I don’t have a production quality voice!