Design Thinking for the Enterprise

In episode three, we are exploring what will happen on day two and three of a design sprint. Get ready to start sketching out solutions and picking which ones you want to test.

Andy Bassiri: Welcome to Design Thinking for the Enterprise. We're going to sketch some solutions today. Hold on to your butts. It's about to go down.

Andy Bassiri: In the last video, we talked about Monday. Monday is huge. We got our stakeholders aligned, we got buy-in, mapped opportunities and pick the target which brings us to Tuesday. Tuesday is fun because this is when we get together and generate a pool of ideas on how we're going to solve our target problem. We're going to be creating, but you don't need to be an artist. If you can draw a box, an arrow, and a stick figure, you're going to do great.

Andy Bassiri: What's important here is that we communicate our ideas visually so people can understand them. By the end of Tuesday, we will have fleshed out solutions we can choose from, but hold on. There's a process to get us there. First we need to steal some shit. Okay. You've heard the adage, good artists borrow, great artists steal. Well, chances are somebody's already solved in an analogous or adjacent problem that we're looking to solve.

Andy Bassiri: So instead of reinventing the wheel, we're going to find existing design patterns and use them as inspiration for our solution prototypes. We call this lightning demos. Bizzz. Director: What is that supposed to be?

Andy Bassiri: Lightning. It's coming out of my fingers. Bizzz. Too much? Not enough? So each team member is going to demo a product or solution, whatever they want that they feel like we can gather some inspiration from. Example, maybe you show an app that has a really sophisticated messaging feature because your application might need messaging or communication. Another example might be, I love how on Instagram you can scroll forever and just keep getting more and more information. All these demos give us inspiration on how to materialize our prototype.

Andy Bassiri: Now we have everything we need to start sketching out solutions, a strategic vision, questions we need answered by our prototype, a focused target on where to start, our biggest opportunities there, and inspiration on how to materialize our solution.

Andy Bassiri: Here's what we're chasing. We want each team member to end up with a detailed and self-explanatory solution sketch. We get there through a progression of activities that build upon each other, helping us reflect on Monday's activities, explore new ideas and riff on different possibilities. When it's all said and done, we should have five or more competing solutions sketches to get us ready for the next day, Wednesday, where we start to decide which solution is going to be the basis of our prototype.

Andy Bassiri: Wednesday. Director: Wednesday is a day of decisioning.

Andy Bassiri: Wednesday is a day of decisioning. Time to decide on which sketch is going to be the basis of our prototype. The first part of the day is where we read through all the solution sketches and start identifying parts that we like. Think of it like a heat map that shows where your team sees the most value in every idea. Once we've gone through all the sketches, we're going to choose which sketch is going to be the basis of our prototype.

Andy Bassiri: Basically, how is the user going to experience the prototype? We're going to identify what the user will see, actions, options, all the details that are going to make our prototypes seem real to our testers. That's right. We're going to test this prototype. And because of that, it's important that we make our prototypes seem as real as possible because we want to get quality data from our testing. And that's why we spend the rest of Wednesday story-boarding our prototype.

Andy Bassiri: We designed it. Now we're going to build it, and then we're going to test this bad boy to find out if we're right about our big idea. This is basically where we find out if our idea sucks or not. That is the focus of our next video where this whole saga comes to an end, done, done, done .

Andy Bassiri: By the way, your part's done. You and your team came together, aligned, sketched, decided. You did your work. Now let us take it, build it, and test it, and we'll talk more about that in the next video.