The Ultimate Guide To Remote Design Sprints

AJ&Smart

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Acknowledgements Berlin, Germany

April, 2020

The Ultimate Guide to Remote Design Sprints would not exist without the support, dedication and hard work of AJ&Smart’s Product Design Team. We also want to thank the Design Sprint community for the inspiration, commitment and enthusiasm to continuously improve the process behind the Design Sprint. Never stop asking the important questions of how we can all work smarter and create better products, faster! Finally, we truly appreciate the community feedback we receive every day and we will be updating this guide based on the suggestions we get from you, the reader! We value any and all feedback we receive about improving various aspects of the Design Sprint process, so we are looking forward to hearing your ideas and advice.

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The Ultimate Guide to Remote Design Sprints by AJ&Smart Over the last 5 years, AJ&Smart has run hundreds of Design Sprints on complex product and business challenges all over the world. Seeing first-hand how effective the Design Sprint methodology is at solving demanding problems, we decided to share our knowledge with anybody who wants to work smarter and create better products, faster.   

It took us a lot of trial and error to figure out the best practices for running Remote Design Sprints. Don’t worry, you don’t have to go through it too! We pooled all our knowledge and lessons learned and compiled them in this handy guide, just for you! This is *the* guide for anybody who wants to learn how to set up, run and facilitate a successful Remote Design Sprint.  

Running a Design Sprint remotely can seem daunting at first, but we believe that Remote Design Sprints are not a challenge to overcome but an opportunity to make your work easier, more collaborative and efficient. In this guide, we have collected all our resources, tools, hacks, tricks and much more for running successful Remote Design Sprints. We have also included useful links and tips from other companies who make working remotely a breeze.

Let's dive in!

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Why Run Remote Design Sprints? Here are some of the main advantages of running a fully remote Design Sprint:

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Team location and availability are not an issue when sprinting remotely. Not everyone can travel or block an entire day for an in-person workshop, but shorter, remote workshop sessions allow for a lot more fl exibility. This can be a huge help when trying to convince a client to run a Remote Design Sprint with you. What is more, you will have an unlimited pool of user testers at your disposal and recruiting gets a lot easier.

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No workshop space? No problem. Let’s face it: Having access to a perfect workshop space is a rare treat. You have to work with what you get and often you will have to accept constraints like cramped, dark rooms, tiny whiteboards and sticky notes that fall off the walls. All of these things are non-issues when you work digitally. You can set up the perfect workspace template for your Sprint workshop and use it over and over again.

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It is efficient! Less busy work, less paper waste. At the end of an in-person workshop, the walls are covered with sticky notes, sketches and paper. You will spend a lot of time after the workshop is over to digitise the results and then you throw most of it into the garbage bin. In a remote

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workshop, everything is already fully digital and can be easily documented, recorded (with permission, of course!) and shared.  •

Contributing ideas is easier, faster and more anonymous. Working digitally allows people to focus on capturing ideas instead of worrying about handwriting or ownership of ideas. It is easy to write and rewrite ideas clearly and quickly, without legibility being an issue.

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It gives facilitators more tools to help others. During an in-person workshop, it can be hard to switch from managing the group to helping individuals. When working remotely, monitoring the progress of each participant is a lot easier and allows you to do discreet, individual coaching when you see someone is struggling. In addition, sharing instructions with everyone becomes a lot easier.

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More focus and quicker sessions. Working with a group of people in one room can be a lot of fun, but it can also lead to distractions, such as unrelated conversations happening at the back of the room or long, chatty coffee breaks. When working remotely, it is easier to keep the focus on the workshop and it allows facilitators to manage the group dynamics a lot better. Furthermore, remote sessions are shorter than their in-person counterparts, so you will achieve more in even less time.

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And last, but not least… you probably already run partially Remote Design Sprints anyway! Think about it: apart from the workshop, how much of the work involved in a Sprint is currently already remote? From conducting research interviews with stakeholders, to prototyping in Figma, to user tests via video call – with a few adjustments and proper planning, you can easily make the jump to a fully Remote Design Sprint.

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The Challenges of Running a Remote Design Sprint Make no mistake: running Design Sprints remains hard work, and Remote Sprints come with their own, unique set of challenges:   •

Working across different time zones. A Remote Design Sprint makes it easier to include people who couldn’t travel or weren’t able to free up their calendar to join in for an all-day session. However, this also means you have to deal with time zone differences and time slots which work for everyone.

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Lower engagement and lack of interpersonal dynamics. Working together in the same location makes it easier to keep everyone highly engaged and accountable. When you have a distributed team, you have to work harder to keep them focused on the task at hand instead of the million little distractions the Internet has to offer.

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Technical issues. Small tech issues can compound quickly and lead to a lot of frustration. Examples include slow or inconsistent wifi connection, low battery, broken mics and glitchy webcams.

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Remote collaboration. Working in the same location and covering it with sticky notes, sketches and drawings on whiteboards makes collaboration feel real to people quickly.

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Working remotely can feel abstract at fi rst, so using the right tools to collaborate in real-time is very important. Don’t worry! In this guide, we will show you how to handle each individual challenge with the right techniques and tools.

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How to Run Remote Design Sprints Successfully Running a successful Remote Design Sprint is dependent on three factors: •

Correct preparation and onboarding. Preparation is important for any workshop, but even more so when it is run remotely! You would never start an in-person workshop without all the necessary materials and properly setting up the room. Similarly, during the run-up of your remote workshop don’t forget to set up your workspace, test your tools and make sure people can get started with as little friction or dead air as possible. Taking the time to manage everybody’s expectations and frame the workshop’s purpose will make a huge difference, both on the participants’ satisfaction and your own peace of mind.  

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The right choice of tools. There is no shortage of fantastic tools to collaborate and communicate, but not all of them are appropriate for every situation. Depending on who you work with and their location, there might be restrictions on what tools they can access and use. Make sure to take this into consideration when you are planning the workshop and always have alternatives to fall back on.

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Facilitation. It is even more important in Remote Design Sprints to have a strong Facilitator. They set the rules and the pace of the workshop, ensuring everyone has clarity on each exercise, understands the importance of the task and knows how much time they have. Everyone else should be on mute for most of the workshop. They can use the chat function to ask questions and the Facilitator reads these out and answers them for the whole group.

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Onboarding Proper onboarding is the secret sauce that leads to smooth, successful Sprints! It makes ALL the difference when you do the groundwork of setting things up thoroughly and in advance. The onboarding phase is critical because it sets up the stage for the entire collaboration and allows you to set up the tech properly, understand the challenges better, identify misalignments faster, defuse conflict and anxiety earlier and manage the expectations of each participant.  Your role during the onboarding is a mixture of a pilot and a flight attendant on a passenger plane. Similarly to a pilot you run technical checks and make sure that everything is going according to plan. On top of that, you welcome the participants on board, make sure they feel comfortable and know what they can expect, just like a flight attendant would. Remember: Just because YOU know what a Design Sprint is, it doesn’t mean that every single participant knows it too. There might be misunderstandings about the difference between a remote workshop and a conference call and it is up to you to clear them up.  In this regard, running the entire Sprint remotely is similar to running it in-person. Dotting the i's and crossing the t's during the onboarding will make your life easier, lead to better outcomes and

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make the entire experience a lot better and pleasant for the participants.  Here are the things we do in the preparation and onboarding phase of a Remote Design Sprint that we consider best practices.

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Talk to the Decider  

Usually, the first touchpoint in the preparation of a Design Sprint is a chat with the Decider or the project’s owner. This is usually the same person, however, often when working with enterprise clients, it might be different people.   

Either way, jump on a call with the Decider as soon as possible and use this opportunity to get as much information and insights as possible about the problem space and the challenge (tip: ask for permission to record these calls for reference!). You should also be ready to run them through a quick overview of the Sprint process and give them the opportunity to ask questions.   

In addition, ask them to confirm who is going to take part in the Sprint workshop! It often happens that this hasn’t been decided yet – if that is the case, coach them on the right team selection. Keep in mind that you need to onboard the other team members, so make sure that you know who the participants are as soon as possible.  

Useful tools and templates:  

Loom - Loom records your screen right from your browser. All recordings are uploaded to the cloud, ready for sharing.

Zoom - Reliable video conferencing that works seamlessly from all kinds of devices and can handle large numbers of participants without any issues. For remote workshops with larger groups consider getting a pro account. AJ&Smart

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Send an onboarding message to all participants  

As soon as you know who is going to join the Sprint, the very first thing you should do is to send each participant a friendly onboarding message where you welcome them, introduce yourself (and your team) and give them an overview of the project’s timeline.   

Provide a link to an online scheduling tool In your first message include a link to an online scheduling tool so that you can book individual interviews with each team member. The interviews themselves can all happen the week before the Sprint, but finding the right time gets more complicated as time passes. Therefore, do this as early as possible to avoid issues with participants’ availability.   

Provide a link to an online survey Another link you should include in your onboarding message is to an online survey where each participant can go through a brief questionnaire to get more insights on the challenge. This is also a great way to detect a lack of alignment in the group – the earlier you are aware of this, the better. The survey has another benefit - when you look at the results, you will see who hasn’t responded yet, most likely because they haven’t read the

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message. This is something that happens in almost every Sprint and it never happens because of malice or a lack of interest. Sometimes, emails don’t make it through a firewall or are classified as spam – it happens. If you do this in advance, you will have plenty of time to reach out to participants individually and remind them to go through the survey and schedule a call.  

Useful tools and templates:  

Basecamp - AJ&Smart uses Basecamp to keep all communications about a project in one place to avoid messy inboxes and email threads, and allow every team member to easily find up-to-date information about a project and what everybody is working on. https://youcanbook.me/ - Online scheduling made easy! Just defi ne time slots and ask participants to pick the one that suits them best. You will automatically get it in your calendar.

Survey template on Google Forms - This is the template for the survey we send to all Sprint participants in preparation of the one-on-one interviews. We gather insights to uncover potential misalignment in the group and get data to frame the challenge in preparation of the workshops!    

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One-on-one interviews with the participants  

If you followed the process outlined above, you should have time blocked in your calendar with individual one-on-one interviews with each participant the week before the first remote workshop kicks off. You should also have each participant’s responses to the survey and you can use this information to structure the call and ask clarifying questions when needed.  

Use the insights of the interviews to populate the workspace Each of these interviews is a goldmine of information and will help you have a much smoother workshop. We use the insights to already populate the workspace of our collaboration tool with virtual HMW’s, Can We’s, 2-Year-Goal’s and a draft of the map. This saves a lot of time and helps the group to get started instead of staring at a blank page. Brief the participants on the workshop tools Another important component of these calls is a quick preflight of the digital whiteboard you will run the workshop on and ensuring the tech is set up correctly. You really don’t want to find out on the day of the workshop that some participants don’t know how to use the tool. Our advice is to do this prep work in advance, because it is going to save you a lot of trouble. Otherwise, we guarantee you that people will have technical AJ&Smart

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difficulties and this will delay your schedule. This is something we learned the hard way! Give the participants a tour of the digital whiteboard you are using and let them quickly play around with the most important features. We will describe this in greater detail later, but don’t worry, it is not complicated! The most important thing they should learn is how to navigate the workspace and create, copy and move virtual sticky notes and dots. Keep it simple! There is no need to confuse them with tools for power users that will only be used by you.  

Brief on communication tools and setting Make sure to ask the participants to check if the communication tools are set up correctly and if their webcams and microphones are working properly. Suggest they book a quiet meeting room with reliable internet for the workshops and ask them to have a stack of letter-sized paper for sketching nearby. This way, there are going to be fewer distractions than staying seated at their desk. They will also feel more comfortable sketching without curious onlookers.  

Brief on the workspace setup We recommend that participants use two screens if possible one for the whiteboard and one for the group video. This is a nice-to-have perk but not always doable. If not, use the call as an

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opportunity to help participants set up their workspace like this: ⅓ of the screen should be dedicated for the video call, and ⅔ for the digital whiteboard. This way, everyone feels like they are working as a team and their participation becomes more collaborative and less anonymous.   

Provide information about the Design Sprint Another important thing to remember: It is likely that the majority of participants (if not all) don’t know what a Design Sprint is, confuse it with Sprints from Scrum/ Agile, or have heard the term but don’t really know what it means in practice. This is normal and you should consider this the perfect opportunity to give them an overview of Design Sprints, the outcomes they can expect, and what the underlying principles are (e.g. “together alone”). And of course to get them excited! The Sprint workshop won’t be another tedious conference call or remote meeting. It is going to be fun, collaborative, creative, challenging – and most of all, satisfying.  

If you take advantage of these calls, the entire group is going to be already familiar with the basics at the start of the workshop. This will make things run a lot smoother, exercises will be faster and you can keep each session shorter.   

 

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Useful tools and templates:  

Loom - Loom records your screen right from your browser. All recordings are uploaded to the cloud, ready for sharing.

Zoom - Reliable video conferencing that works seamlessly from all kinds of devices and can handle large numbers of participants without any issues. For remote workshops with larger groups, you should definitely get a pro account.

Basecamp - AJ&Smart uses Basecamp to keep all communications about a project in one place to avoid messy inboxes and email threads, and to allow every team member to easily find up-to-date information about a project and what everybody is working on. Miranda Time Zone App - We use this to quickly find time slots that work for everyone when scheduling remote workshops across different time zones. 

Survey template on Google Forms - This is the template for the survey we send to all Sprint participants in preparation of the one-on-one interviews. We gather insights to uncover potential misalignment in the group and get data to frame the challenge in preparation of the workshops.

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Running a remote workshop It’s showtime! The time has come to kick off the fi rst remote workshop of your Design Sprint.  One by one, participants join the Zoom meeting and you can see their cursors move over the digital whiteboard. Today you are going to be busy facilitating, but if you have done the necessary prep and onboarding work, everything should go smoothly and you should be able to focus 100% on facilitation.  Here are a few tips to make your job even easier! 

Your workspace We run our remote workshops entirely on digital whiteboards. There are a bunch of great tools out there - we have made good experiences with Miro, others swear by Mural. We even used Google Slides once, when Miro was not an option. Honestly, the tool you prefer is not that important. The important thing is that participants can all see each other and interact and contribute to the whiteboard in real-time. This makes collaboration a lot more tangible. Prepare the whiteboard The entire workshop will rely on your digital whiteboard, so take your time to properly prepare the workspace. The good thing AJ&Smart

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about working digitally is that you can create your perfect workshop setup and then turn it into a template that you can reuse over and over again. It is a good investment of time that will save you a lot of work in the long run.  Reduce presentation channels We recommend that you avoid jumping back and forth between a workshop deck and the digital whiteboard. Each time you do that, some participants will be left behind confused and it will take time to get everyone’s focus back. Miro allows you to embed slides on

the digital whiteboard directly. Ideally, you would have onboarded participants to the process before the workshop, so that everybody understands the principles right before the workshop starts. This allows you to jump straight into workshop mode and to get people engaged. Use separate frames Our recommendation is to create a separate frame for each exercise and each part of the workshop: One for HMW’s, one for the Map, one each for Can We’s and Goals, and so on. Each of these frames will be the focal point for each exercise and will allow participants to quickly navigate the workspace. It is also a nice way to structure the workshop and give participants a sense of accomplishment as they move through the frames.

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Setting up Even with diligent preparation and onboarding and even if you have worked with the client or team remotely before, you should still buffer 5-10 mins for people to join and work out the kinks that are bound to happen occasionally in a remote setup. Take this into account when you are sending out calendar invites! This way you won’t stress out because you have gone over schedule.  

Keep remote workshops shorter In general, we recommend keeping remote workshops shorter than their in-person counterparts. Sitting in front of a screen is surprisingly exhausting and after a while, it gets very hard to stay focused. We always limit them to a maximum duration of 4 hours – this includes breaks and an overtime buffer, so realistically you should be able to finish earlier. There are a couple of natural breaking points in the workshop structure when it makes sense to end the session and continue the morning next day.

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Set up two screens  As a facilitator, it really helps to have two screens: one for the digital whiteboard (e.g. Miro, Mural), and another one for the video call (Zoom, Hangouts, etc.). This way, you can see all participants and check if someone looks confused or distracted, or if they have technical problems.

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Encourage video conferencing Encourage participants to switch on their webcams and share their video! This will help you see if engagement is low or if any of the participants seem confused. It will also encourage the participants to work from a quiet place instead of just dialling in and muting while driving for example. An added bonus is that you will have more fun when you see each other. Zoom, for example, offers virtual backgrounds and the AJ&Smart team often uses them to lighten up the mood at the start of a remote workshop! Useful tools and resources: Zoom - Reliable video conferencing that works seamlessly from all kinds of devices and can handle large numbers of participants without any issues. For remote workshops with larger groups, you should definitely get a pro account.

Miro - Miro is a digital whiteboard and our tool of choice for smooth real-time collaboration, both for running remote workshops with clients and working more efficiently as a team.

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AJ&Smart Remote Workshop Template - This is our remote workshop template on Miro. This is view only because you have to invite people individually for editor access, but feel free to take a look around and use this as a template for your own setup! 7 ways to make remote collaboration more effective with an online whiteboard - More on how to get the most out of using a digital whiteboard.  

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Facilitation Warm-up Warm-ups are a great way to break the ice, while also encouraging people to explore the digital whiteboard before the real workshop exercises kick off. Sometimes, it is the first time a team has worked together, even if they all work at the same company. That’s why it is a good idea to set a welcoming, social tone at the start of the first session. You can use some of the following warm-up exercises to

energise the team. •

We often start our workshops with a quick 360° introduction round, while we familiarise participants with the sticky notes, the principles of “together alone” and time-boxing. We ask each participant to create three sticky notes and complete one of these sentences: “My name is…”, “My role is…”, and “My wish for the Sprint is…” This is done in silence and with a 5-minute timer. When the time is up, we take turns to read out our sticky notes and introduce ourselves. It is as simple as it gets, doesn’t take a lot of time and serves as a nice way to introduce everybody and learn the tools.

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In a different version of this exercise, we ask the participants to complete the sentences: “My name is…”, “My first job was…” and “Something I learned there was…”

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There is a lot of great icebreaker exercises out there and you easily adapt them to remote work. However, we recommend

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you use icebreakers which allow people to quickly try out the tools of the digital whiteboard and utilise some of the sprint principles.

Preparing Map, HMW’s, Goal and Can We’s In the guide to onboarding, we recommend to survey and interview participants and the Decider in advance of the Sprint workshop. If you do this properly, you can already capture A LOT that would come up in the workshop and add it to the digital whiteboard before the kick-off! We do this in every single Sprint, whether it is in-person or remote. It has made our Sprints a lot less stressful for us and has led to improved outcomes and higher client satisfaction. This has several advantages:  •

You don’t start from a blank canvas. It is a lot easier and less intimidating for participants to add to (and tweak) existing material than to fi ll an empty workspace. 

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Participants are still able to contribute to each exercise. The artefacts you prepared in advance set a nice example to work from and make it easier to understand what’s expected from them in each exercise.

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It makes facilitation easier. The prepared artefacts will spark other ideas faster. It also shows that you listened to each interview and made the effort to understand each participant’s unique perspective, so you will immediately build

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up rapport and trust with the team. •

It makes the workshop smoother and faster. The digital whiteboard makes it super easy to move artefacts around and change wordings – much faster than on a real whiteboard. So even if you end up changing some of the prepared artefacts, you will save time.

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It leads to better outcomes. The team can focus on thinking about the challenges without worrying about phrasing each sticky note perfectly, since you already did this for them.

If you do this, you can guide all participants through each exercise, show them all prepared artefacts, allow them to read through them and add new ones afterwards. 

Useful resources:  

10 things about remote facilitation we (AJ&Smart) wish we’d known sooner - In this article, we share even more tips on nailing remote facilitation.

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Voting Many digital whiteboards, such as Miro, have built-in voting features. However, we prefer to do things a bit more ‘old-school’, even when working remotely. Just like you would in an in-person workshop, we create little red and green circles and use them as virtual stickers to vote on sticky notes and concepts. Why? Because it is visual, fun and easy. There is no learning curve for participants. If they understand how to move the sticky notes around, they know how to use the virtual dots.  Another advantage of this approach is that you can vote on different elements. If you use the built-in voting functionality of Miro, you are restricted on WHAT you can vote on. You can vote on individual elements like sticky notes, but if you want to create a heatmap of an uploaded image of a concept, you can’t vote on individual parts of the image – just on the entire image itself. So for the heatmap, little red dots work a lot better and we prefer to keep things simple.

Timeboxing Digital whiteboards like Miro and Mural have built-in timers that are easy to use and allow every participant to see clearly how much time is left (which isn’t always the case in in-person workshops). However, be aware that once you set them off, they will keep counting down until they go off or you reset them. During inperson workshops, we like to sneakily tweak the timers when we realise some participants need a few more minutes or when the

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group is finished earlier than expected. This isn’t really doable when working remotely – so once the timer is down to 60 seconds, quickly check-in if anybody needs more time. 

Get a co-facilitator  

Facilitating a Sprint involves a lot of legwork like sorting and clustering sticky notes, getting new supplies, or making a coffee run and preparing refreshments. These tasks might not strike you as sexy or glamorous, but they are crucial to ensure a smooth Sprint and happy participants – and it is a huge help for facilitators when somebody is around to give them a hand. So if you can, get a co-facilitator to help with keeping the workspace tidy and organised. This allows you to fully focus on facilitation and engaging with the participants. Since you are not in the same room with the other participants, every second you spend sorting through virtual sticky notes is dead air where participants aren’t guided and don’t know what’s going on. So having an extra pair of hands can make a big difference.   

In fact, this is also how AJ&Smart trains new facilitators. The first few Sprints you help the lead facilitator until you are ready to facilitate individual exercises and then, eventually, the entire workshop.   

If you have a co-facilitator, ensure that responsibilities are assigned in advance. Only the main facilitator should lead the workshop so that confusion is avoided.   

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If you don’t have somebody helping you, preparing becomes even more important. During the workshop, focus on engaging the group and leave cleaning up for the breaks, or do it after the workshop.  

Avoiding distractions  

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Turn phones to flight mode unless you really need to have it on.

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Keep each workshop session short and focused, and have fewer, but longer breaks. Sitting in front of a computer can get really tedious and exhausting. You shouldn’t expect people to sit through 8 hours of a remote workshop. Find ways to do more, but shorter sessions. We are breaking up the two inperson workshop days into four remote sessions.

 

Microphones and webcams If you are planning to run Remote Design Sprints regularly, it is worth adding a proper external microphone to your set up. Your voice will sound clearer and crisper when facilitating, and it is more professional. Some microphones also have a dedicated button to mute the microphone, which often comes in handy. We use Blue Yeti USB mics, but there are a ton of other great options out there. While built-in webcams are good enough for most purposes, you might want to treat yourself and get something that offers more quality. As a facilitator, you should have a sharp and brightly lit image. We are using Logitech C920 HD PRO webcams, but again,

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there are other great options out there, depending on your budget. If you want to get really fancy, you might also think about getting proper lighting so your face is evenly lit.   While not a must-have, having a good external microphone and webcam is an investment that quickly pays off. You can use them for remote user testing, recording screencasts, videos or podcasts, and your video calls will look a lot more professional. Here is an example of the remote setup Amr, our Head of Corporate Training and a self-proclaimed techie, has at home:

  

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Storyboarding Just like in an in-person workshop, the Storyboard consolidates all chosen ideas and maps them out in greater detail to align everybody on what exactly is going to happen in the prototype. Storyboarding is probably the most challenging exercise to facilitate. Up until now, every decision and every discussion was guided by a clear process, and you were able to think about the bigger picture and ideas in broader strokes, without having to worry too much about the details. This allowed you to cut some discussion short.  But now those details really matter and it is likely that the group will have many circular discussions about how to phrase copy or what a screen should look like.  This is why we never jump straight into storyboarding, whether it is in-person or remote. We came up with a few hacks that make the Storyboard session a lot easier and streamlined. User Test Flow First, we do a remote User Test Flow where each participant takes six sticky notes and, step by step, writes out their high-level prototype flow from start to end. In the end, the decider picks their favourite flow (with the option to mix and match as well). It is still not going into too much detail, but establishes some guard rails that structure the discussions around the storyboard. Once the

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decider has made their decision, each sticky note from the chosen flow is placed in one the cells of the Storyboard. Concept Pasting It is very likely that the key screens have already been sketched out to some degree of detail in the concept chosen by the Decider. Maybe some of the other concepts show relevant interface elements. Great! Take screenshots and paste them to the relevant cells. Breadboarding The sticky notes from the User Test Flow establish the baseline of what needs to happen in the Storyboard. Breadboarding (a concept taken from Basecamp’s Shape Up method) takes the level of detail one step further, but still without drawing detailed screens. Instead, the co-facilitator captures interface elements and contents of each screen in simple shorthand descriptions and collects them in a list on each cell. 

Useful tools and templates: Design Sprint 2.0 Storyboarding Hack - This video runs you through User Test Flow exercise. Adapting it for remote workshopping is really straight-forward, it works great on a digital whiteboard! Breadboarding in Ryan Singer’s Shape Up - A detailed description of breadboarding.

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Prototyping The workshop is over. Now it is time to turn the chosen ideas into a high-fidelity, interactive, testable prototype. If you have run Design Sprints before, you know that a lot of work needs to happen in a short amount of time. Usually, you only have one day before the first test, so you have to make sure to work as efficiently as possible. A few years ago, we were frustrated with how much valuable time we lost during prototyping just on swapping design files and aligning on a design direction. Some prototypes looked disjointed because each designer on the team worked on a different journey, and didn’t have enough time to clean things up before the first test. These weren’t huge issues that affected the tests, but we knew we could make more progress and get up to a more realistic and refined prototype if we could just focus more on design and spend less time juggling files and doing check-in meetings. The answer to our trouble was Figma and since we started using it we haven’t looked back.  What Miro or Mural are for digital workspaces, Figma is for design and prototyping. It allows teams to work on the same file in the cloud, collaborative and in real time. You can follow the work others are doing in real-time, comment and ask each other for feedback, or even work on the same screen as a team. Other members of the Sprint team can join the workspace and add comments, change

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copy or record a quick video update with Loom, without interrupting the flow of the prototypers. For one project, we collaborated with the client’s design team in another time zone. When our workday ended, they took over and continued the work. It was amazing to see designers from San Francisco and Berlin zipping and zooming around the same workspace, collaboration and joking with each other without even being on the same continent. This allowed us to make an incredible amount of progress and our client loved the results! And if this wasn’t enough already, Figma allows you to create an entire clickable, interactive prototype with a few clicks and share it with user testers via URL. Installing a client is not necessary and you don’t need to export any screens to upload them to a third party prototyping tool. In addition, Figma offers a huge library of plugins that can make your work a lot easier.  Can you already tell we love Figma?

Useful tools and templates:  

Figma - vector-based real-time collaboration for designers to create high-fi delity, developer-ready designs and interactive prototypes.

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User testing AJ&Smart generally runs all user tests remotely. It is a lot more convenient and greatly increases the quality of the tests, since you can access a bigger pool of viable candidates and you can recruit them anywhere in the world. It also allows you to plan for contingencies and recruit stand-in testers in case you have a noshow. But first, let’s talk about what needs to happen before you can show the prototype to testers. 

Recruiting The team members doing the user recruiting are the unsung heroes of every Design Sprint. Everybody is excited to see the results of a day full of user tests, but finding people to test with, getting them to sign up and show up on time is hard, non-stop work and can last several days – depending on the profile of users you are looking for.  If you have to recruit testers for a B2C product, it is usually a lot easier to find a big enough pool of people to test with. If you are looking for people to test a B2B product or testers with very specific expertise, it is going to be a lot harder. The good news is, you have a few options that can make this process a lot easier. But be aware that while some of them are

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easier than others, none of them is a magic bullet. You should start recruiting as early as possible, and it is possible that a mix of several approaches is going to get you better results.

Option 1: Ask the client to refer testers to you This is the easiest and most straight-forward way to get testers. You

can ask your client to provide you with people to test with. These could be participants in an existing Beta program or customers they have a close relationship with.  Be aware that this option is a luxury and you shouldn’t get used to relying on it too much. Companies are (understandably) protective of their relationship with customers and won’t do anything that could risk it… like showing them a prototype of a radical new product, or handing over their contact details to a third party.   Speaking of which, there are legal or privacy issues you have to consider as well. Clients will never, ever give you customer data without asking them for permission first, and this might take time. It is also possible that this approach will not get you enough people to test with, and you need to find more using the other methods described here. If you ask clients to help you, you are giving up a lot of control over the recruiting process, so it is better to hedge your bets and still try to recruit yourself. In some cases, though, this is the only realistic option. For example, in one Design Sprint for a car manufacturer, we needed to test with owners of high-performance race cars – of which less than 200 had

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been sold worldwide. When you are testing a product for a hyperspecific market, you have no choice but to rely on your client. Help them by writing a paragraph explaining the test logistics that they can use in an email to reach out to customers. Sit down with the person responsible for reaching out to customers (usually somebody from the sales or support team) and discuss the criteria you are looking for in testers.

Option 2: Use a recruiting service This option is convenient but can be pricey. There are dedicated recruiting businesses that look for people to test with, based on the criteria you give them.  This can be a good option, but you should still expect a lead time of at least a week, so start recruiting early. Be aware that the more specific your criteria are (e.g. location, age, professional background, work experience), the likelihood of finding enough testers gets lower. So if you use a recruiting service, always have a backup plan.  There are also very expensive recruiting and research companies that can find testers from more specific backgrounds and specific demographics. We used one of these services when we were really stumped how to find the right kind of testers and were amazed that they managed to get us high quality testers on time.  As we like to use recruiting services as a backup, we have a roster of testers ready to jump in if we have cancellations.

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Option 3: Recruit with Facebook Ads

Usually, we recruit our user testers with Facebook Ads. This works really well when testing a B2C product, but you can also find testers from more specific demographics and backgrounds.  Facebook allows you to target your recruiting ads very specifically, and not just on Facebook itself, but also on other Facebook properties, like Instagram or FB Messenger. Using the Facebook Ad Manager is as much an art as a science. Facebook regularly changes their algorithm, so we won’t be going into too much detail how to set up and run a campaign. When people eventually click

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on your ad, they should be linked to a screener survey you set up on Typeform or Google Forms (more on that later). One important thing to keep in mind: Just because somebody sees your ad doesn’t mean they will click on it. Therefore, try to make your ad interesting and trustworthy. Teasing a reward for participation in the test is a good incentive. Don’t forget to keep the text short and simple and add a nice photo of people doing a user test. For a Facebook campaign, you need to strike the right balance between targeting specific criteria and addressing a big enough audience. We would recommend that you funnel as many people from the right demographic as possible to your screener survey, even if they only fit the more general criteria (such as location or age). You can still qualify this pool of candidates with your screener survey, so don’t exclude too many people. 

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Option 4: Reach out directly This is the option that involves most work, but it is your best bet when you realise time is running out and the tester criteria are too specific to rely on Facebook’s ad algorithm.  If you are looking for people with a very specific job title, hit up the search on LinkedIn to find people to contact directly. If you need to test with people with a specific medical condition, look for online self-help groups. If you want to talk to people with an obscure hobby or interest, look it up on Reddit. You will need to get creative with this approach, and while it is the most stressful of the options, it can also be really fun.  Similarly to the previous option, your aim is to get as many people as possible to click a link to your screener survey and fill it out. Start by writing a text where you introduce yourself, and who you are looking for to test with. Also explain how the test will be conducted, otherwise people will feel anxious. Make clear that this is a test of a product, and you are looking for honest feedback - and that there will be a reward. Keep this text short, you don’t need to go into too much detail until you are reaching out to people who filled out your survey. Then, use this text and paste it everywhere you expect to find people with the right profile.

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Screener Survey A screener survey is a short questionnaire with multiple choice questions that helps you narrow down the pool of people interested in testing to a handful of qualified candidates that fit your criteria perfectly and will get you the answers you need.  Tools like Google Forms or Typeform make it easy to quickly build beautiful, shareable surveys and collect all responses in a spreadsheet. You should always err on the side of caution and expect that some of the people filling out the survey will bend the truth to a certain extent – either because there is a reward involved, or out of plain curiosity. Since you are testing with only five people, if one tester doesn’t fit the criteria, they can skew the results.  This is why it is important to construct the survey in a way that makes it harder to guess the answers you are looking for. You want to throw off people that click every possible answer in hopes of getting a reward for testing. All possible answers to a multiple choice question should sound plausible and should be, as much as possible, mutually exclusive. Also, a lot of survey tools allow you to set up conditions and branching logic, but we recommend to avoid setting up an obvious “fail state” for the survey (“Sorry, but you don’t fit the profile we are looking for…”). Otherwise, some people will do the survey over and over again, until they get the answers right.

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In addition to the questions that qualify if they fit the criteria, you should ask if they have a preferred time to do the test, and if they have the necessary tech setup like computer, webcam, and internet connection (like with the qualifying questions, don’t make it obvious that there are right and wrong answers). And don’t forget to ask how to contact them! You should get an email and their phone number. If legally required, let them opt-in to get contacted by you and allow you to save and use their data for the purpose of testing. If your recruiting funnels enough people to your survey, your spreadsheet should fill up quickly. Several hundred submissions are pretty common, but the spreadsheet makes it easy to filter, sort and get a shortlist of good candidates quickly.

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Scheduling Once you have a roster of promising candidates, you reach out to them directly and try to schedule them for specific time slots on testing day. Don’t forget to block time for the team to take a break as well, as more than two tests in a row is pretty exhausting and the team’s focus will go down as well. In your email, give the testers more information on the test and try and build a good rapport with them – they might have to plan their day around the test, so they deserve some attention and gratitude from us.  The day before the tests, contact them by phone and confirm the test appointment. We discovered that people are a lot more likely to show up if they actually talked to a human before. Email communication is very abstract and faceless, and they might think that they are just one candidate among hundreds – so jump on a call with them, and let them know that you appreciate that they are taking the time to look at your prototype. Just to be on the safe side, you should always recruit more people than you need. This way, you have backup testers ready in case of a no-show. 

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Interviewing User Testers For remote user interviews we use Whereby. It works great on Google Chrome and doesn’t require participants to create an account or install software – all they have to do is install a plug-in for screen sharing. However, this is super fast and doesn’t cause too much friction.  Another reason why Whereby is our video conferencing tool of choice for user testing: You can set up a room with a dedicated, permanent URL so you don’t have to share confusing meeting IDs every time. You can also lock rooms to avoid people joining by accident in the middle of an interview.  Whereby also allows you to record interviews and save the recording locally. We only use this as a failsafe, for our test recordings we always use Loom (remember to always ask for permission before recording!). It makes sharing the videos really easy, as all videos are stored in the cloud right after the recording is over. To capture notes digitally, we use Miro. It is fast, avoids wasting

time and paper and gets you fully digital, easily readable notes that can be quickly shared or exported after the test is done! We capture all notes from the test in the same board we used for the workshop. This allows clients to watch as the user feedback builds up and we have everything pertaining to the Sprint in one location. 

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Useful tools and templates:  

Loom - Loom records your screen directly from your browser. All recordings are uploaded to the cloud, ready for sharing. User Test Intro Script - Use this script at the beginning of a test.

Whereby - When talking with users, we want to keep things as simple and effortless as possible. This is why Whereby is still our favourite: It is easy to set up and it just works!

Miro AJ&Smart Wall of Justice - Besides running remote workshops, we utilise Miro to take notes during user testing, where it has proven itself to be highly effective and rendered paper sticky notes obsolete. Here is our Miro template for capturing test

notes.  

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Handover and Wrap-up Congratulations, you are almost there! All that is left to do now is to document and summarise the results of the Sprint, and package everything up for the client. To make this easier, we use Google Slides and divide and conquer. Google Slides allows users to work on the same presentation in real-time. The way it works in our team is that each team member takes over a different part of the report, for example breaking down the user feedback, or adding screenshots and photos. At the end, we do a proofreading pass where we leave comments on parts that warrant further discussion, or fix typos on the fly. At the end, we export the deck as a PDF file to share it with clients. We then run the client through the results in a one-hour video call via Zoom, where we can also answer all open questions or give tips on how to best proceed.

Useful tools and templates: Google Slides - Google Slides’ collaboration make it easy to “divide and conquer” and quickly create reports documenting and summarising the results of a Sprint with your team.

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Conclusion That’s it! We hope you found this guide helpful. Remote Design Sprints are not as scary as they seem. By making sure you have followed all the steps correctly (onboarding and setup, facilitation, prototyping, user testing, and handover), using the right tools, and preparing properly, you might even find you prefer them to in-person Sprints! We would recommend running an internal sprint between colleagues to begin with to familiarise yourselves with the small changes to the process, using online tools and ensuring you are confident for your first Remote Design Sprint. We would love to hear how this Guide has helped you and your team!

Happy Sprinting!

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If you enjoyed our Ultimate Guide to Remote Design Sprints, feel free to share it with anybody who might find it helpful! For more information about Design Sprints, strategy and innovation, follow us on our social media channels:

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Want to dive deeper into Design Sprints? We recorded a FREE 1.5-hour video training where we share how learning to run Design Sprints like a pro completely transformed the AJ&Smart business. Check it out here for a limited time!

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Notes Use this section to include any notes, comments or ideas you have about running Remote Design Sprints successfully. ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………

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