The Design Sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process that is utilized to validate new product ideas and design solutions through prototyping, user feedback, and iteration.

Design Sprint Methodology → is coming as a standalone section soon. Stay tuned.

It was developed by Jake Knapp and his team at Google Ventures ****and has been used by many leading companies, including Airbnb, Slack, and Google.

The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.

Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.

The five phases of a Design Sprint

1. Understand: In this phase, the team identifies the problem they are trying to solve and defines the project goal. The team also creates a map of the problem and reviews any existing research or data related to the project.
2. Sketch: This phase involves generating a range of ideas for potential solutions to the problem. Team members work individually to sketch out their ideas, then present and discuss them with the group.
3. Decide: In this phase, the team decides which ideas to pursue further. They use a series of structured exercises to narrow down the ideas to the most promising ones.
4. Prototype: The team creates a realistic, interactive prototype of the chosen solution. The prototype is designed to simulate the experience of the final product.
5. Validate: In this final phase, the team tests the prototype with real users to validate its effectiveness and gather feedback. The team then iterates on the design based on the feedback received.

The Design Sprint is a valuable tool in the ideation phase of UX design methodology as it allows teams to rapidly test and iterate on ideas. It also helps to ensure that the final product meets user needs and expectations.

The big idea with the Design Sprint is to build and test a prototype in just five days. You'll take a small team, clear the schedule for a week, and rapidly progress from problem to tested solution using a proven step-by-step checklist.