Design Sprints for Learning

One of the hottest techniques in UX today is the 5-day design sprint, used to answer “critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.” Sprints can help launch a startup, assist existing organizations work through difficult problems, or be useful to anyone with an idea worth exploring.

But design sprints don’t have to be 5 days — they can be done in as little as a few hours and still be a valuable tool for learning, as you’ll see in this workshop.

You’ll learn all about design sprints by doing condensed versions of several activities that are core to the experience. This will be mixed with short presentations on the basics of how to facilitate a successful sprint, and how organizations can incorporate them for educational purposes. So, you’ll both learn by doing and be able to absorb the presentations in easily digestible chunks.

The activities will all be conducted around a specific case study from the .edu space. You’ll be given a full scenario and enough background material to be successful.

We’ll cover the basics of a design sprint, tips and tricks for success, and get into specifics on how it can also be used to facilitate learning in a formal education setting, or within any team.

You’ll leave the workshop with the slide deck, a guide to conducting design sprints, resources for further reading on the topic, and the confidence to incorporate design sprints into your work.

What you’ll do:

• Conduct user interviews
• Synthesize results into an actionable dataset
• Develop a paper prototype
• Test the prototype