My Introduction to Design Sprints

Laura
2 min readFeb 15, 2022

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In February 2020, I attended Getting Started with Design Sprints hosted by Design Sprints London. Being new to design and UX, I was excited to get down to business and learn a new way of tackling a problem. Alongside their presentation, we actually had the opportunity to break out into groups and work through aspects of a design sprint.

First, we were presented with the problem. In this case, it was a man trying to figure out what present to buy for a friend. We watched an interview with a user who explained his journey, thoughts, and feelings around gift-giving. We then broke into groups and completed an empathy map. I’d never done one of these before but it was pretty intuitive. It’s a tool that essentially helps the researcher organise the participant’s thoughts and feelings and to better understand their pains and gains. In social work, I completed similar mapping exercises with my team.

See that little patch of red hair behind the person with the black curls? That’s me!
Our very full empathy map.

After completing the empathy map, we began plotting our insights on a customer journey map. By combining these two visualisation techniques, we were able to better understand how our user was feeling and what they were thinking throughout their journey of purchasing a gift for their friend.

Having a great time learning about design sprints.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time and weren’t able to continue onto ideation. It was exciting to get a glimpse of the design sprint process and try out new techniques. I look forward to using empathy maps to better understand users. It’s a great tool to help organise their thoughts and feelings into tangible insights.

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Laura
Laura

Written by Laura

Social worker turned UX researcher.

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