Essential Tools to Run Effective Remote Design Sprints

Run a successful online design sprint ...

As we settle into the new year, many of us are still working from home, or have even found new jobs in the world of remote work. And, as many companies move to more lean, agile structures, it’s really important to figure out the most effective but balanced ways to solve design problems.

At home there can be pressure to work overtime, meetings can become cyclical and unproductive, and the distractions of life can get in the way. If you have a new client or a new product on the horizon, you need a strategy to help both you and your business stay effective, creative, and healthy. Enter: the remote design sprint.

Stanley Vaganov (@stanley_vm) is a designer and design sprint facilitator with over fifteen years of experience, working with companies such as Microsoft, Lincoln, Harris Poll, and Bloomberg. BeCurious Studio is Stanley’s award winning digital design agency based in New York and remotely worldwide. They specialize in the design sprint approach to solve problems for their customers. Stanley’s focus is on empathy-driven user experience, and great design, combined with forward-thinking technology.

Stanley’s course on remote design sprinting is a deep dive into the strategy. Read on to learn more about the five-day outline, and the tools you’ll need to carry a sprint out successfully and keep your team motivated.

What is a design sprint?

Many designers, coders, and digital creators will be familiar with the concept of ‘sprinting’: organizing your workflow into a short, set period of time in order to achieve a particular goal.

A design sprint aims to bring relevant people from a business together in order to concept, build, and test a prototype within a few days. Think old-school focus group for the tech era. Generally, you’ll want a group of multidisciplinary team members, around five to ten. There is no pass or fail here, only testing and learning about how effective your idea really is.

The specific sprint type Stanley explains originated with Jake Knapp at Google Ventures, and has gone from a tech and design industry secret to a start-up favorite. Within the sprint, you’ll work over five days to map, sketch, vote on, build, and test a prototype. Stanley breaks down each of these steps in detail throughout his course.

Getting everyone in the same room used to be a tricky business, often involving international travel and about a million sticky-notes! Now, not only can we connect around the world, we can coordinate the best times and patterns that work specifically for the people involved.

Tools and rules

So, how can you run your own remote design sprint for your genius idea? It helps to follow some basic rules, such as having no mobile phones during discussion periods, and ensuring every team member keeps their own notes. This keeps any information from being lost. Then, you’ll need the following tools to keep everyone focused and collaborative at the right times.

Miro board

Possibly the most important tool for your sprint is a collaborative environment for sharing ideas and your roadmap. If you have all the key information in one place, everyone can feel involved and up-to-date.

Miro is a virtual whiteboard that can be written on simultaneously by different people. Digital sticky notes can be used for ideas, while voting dots can be used to measure how popular ideas are. In his course, Stanley shares an exact method to set up your board, and provides a template for you to use, with the board split up into the five days. Then, you can invite colleagues with an invite link, or directly with their email address.

Google Timer

A simpler but still essential tool is a timer. In the design sprint workflow, every activity you do will adhere to a strict time limit. Google Timer is a free tool you can use to keep everyone on track. Just search 'timer' to start.

Video Conference Tool

While you share ideas and plans on Miro, you’ll need to be talking aloud with your teammates. In fact, you might have a video chat open for almost the entirety of the five days (except maybe when the prototype is being built), so you are all dialed-in to what’s going on. Stanley recommends Zoom, or Google Hangout, to achieve this.

World Time Buddy

If you are working in an international team, time differences are an important factor to consider. A remote design sprint needs everyone to be in a ‘virtual room’ together for all or most of the time. You don’t want one set of colleagues to follow normal working hours, while another is desperately drinking coffee at 3 a.m.!

With a tool like World Time Buddy, you can input each city that colleagues are located in, and it will show you the bands where their timings overlap. This will help you schedule effectively.

Prototyping Software

Although only one or two people may actually build the prototype, even this process can be shared with others. Adobe XD and Figma are both great tools for prototyping.

Stanley demonstrates the process of setting up a menu in Adobe XD, where you can click and drag elements to plug them into each other, forming a flow that can then be demonstrated to others. So you can set up basic loops and UX without needing to code.

It’s worth noting that Figma also has its own whiteboard feature called FigJam, so you can all be commenting and making notes together while the prototype is designed.

Notion

Finally, we mentioned before that the whole team needs to be recording notes whenever possible. Notion is the tool Stanley recommends for this, and he also provides a template for the five-day structure, so all your notes can be organized effortlessly. Notion is a cloud-based note-taking app where you can make schedules and to-do lists for just about anything. It’s super flexible, so you can set it up in a way that works for your team and product.

World Time Buddy - Time Convertor

World Time Buddy (WTB) is a convenient world clock, a time zone converter, and an online meeting scheduler. It's one of the best online productivity tools for those often finding themselves traveling, in flights, in online meetings or just calling friends and family abroad.

Zoom

The Zoom platform is one most would be aware of for it's video conferencing and online meeting tools but the range of products and services offered by the platform, from virtual meetings to team chat functionality and conference room systems, are a great support for any design sprint process.

Adobe XD

Built from the ground up with performance top of mind, Adobe XD helps you craft prototypes that look and feel like the real thing, so you can communicate your design vision and maintain alignment across your team efficiently. Adobe XD is a powerful and easy-to-use vector-based experience design platform that gives teams the tools they need to craft the world’s best experiences collaboratively.

With these tools and a positive team mindset, you can truly make a mark on a client’s goals, user journey, customer experience or your company roadmap in just one working week.

If you want to master the system, remember to check out Stanley Vaganov’s full course, Remote Design Sprints: Innovating for Success. And for more tips on perfecting your workflow, check out these design management and innovation design courses.

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