Remember the days when you used to put a tape in your Acorn or Atari and patiently wait for Space Invaders or Crossy Road to load up? Ah, happy days! Times have certainly changed since then and no one is happy to wait for anything.

One-click purchase, download in seconds, instant access; the world is a demanding place. Customers expect goods and services to be available at a moment’s notice. There’s no time for delay anymore. Whether you’re talking internet banking, app downloads or online shopping, we all demand instant access.

When it comes to staying ahead of the competition it’s absolutely vital to be able to bring new products and services to market quickly and efficiently. If you can’t, someone else will!

When you’re grappling with bringing a new concept, product or service to market it can seem that you have a mountain to climb and progress can feel slow. A product design sprint is the perfect way to move forward with an idea or concept. It will help your team to truly promote innovation. Within one week you can have the data, analysis and prototypes you need to help you make an informed decision about the next steps for your project.

What is a 5 Day Sprint?

A 5 Day Sprint is a means of solving big problems and testing a solution in just 5 days. The idea is that a team can explore a problem and come up with one or more wireframes, clickable prototypes or even the very beginnings of a website or application that can be tested with five target customers on the final day to get feedback on what works, what doesn’t work and what improvements can be made when the project goes into full development.

What does a 5 Day Sprint with IJYI Look Like?

You’ll gather your team together and we’ll bring our A-team along for 5 days of work, fun, coffee and of course sticky notes! Here’s what you can expect:

Day 1 – Explore the problem

On Day 1 we “start at the end“. We imagine the perfect future where this idea achieved all you wanted it too, but we also imagine how and why it may have failed. This helps set a long-term goal and a set of key questions to answer during the Sprint.

Day 2 – Remix and Sketch

On day 2 we will review everything that we’ve learned on Day 1 and start to come up with ideas using industry and best practice examples for inspiration. Everything from the good, the crazy to the ultimate wish-list should be discussed.

The top ideas are chosen by the team and turned into sketches using a four-step process including Crazy 8s. With a Crazy 8, each idea is taken and 8 variations of that idea are created to explore the potential of the idea even further.

From this we will work together to pull out the best ideas and form them into storyboards. Your meeting room walls will turn into a gallery of ideas!

Day 3 – Decisions, decisions

This is when you start to make some big decisions to take the idea forward. A facilitator will run through each storyboard and, using sticky dots, the team marks up all of the ideas from across all the storyboards. From this you have a “heatmap” which will allow you to pull the best bits from each idea.

The designated decision maker decides on which elements should be taken forward to prototyping. A final storyboard will be created showing exactly what will go into your prototype.

Day 4 – Prototype

We love day 4, it’s really exciting! On Day 4 you’ll get to see all of your hard work put into an actual prototype. The IJYI software development team will pull together all of the information and ideas from the last few days and build a mock-up which allows the key questions to be answered during Fridays interviews.

Day 5 – User Testing

A crucial day! Now it’s time to show your prototype to some real-life customers or potential customers. The sprint team will watch interviews with customers via web-cam so that they don’t influence answers. The key to these interviews is to take the positive, negative and neutral comments and turn them into themes. You can then work through these themes to further tweak and refine your solution. Feedback from real-life users is absolutely key to ensure that you are solving the right problems in the best way.

From here you have an excellent piece of proven work to take to internal stakeholders and agree next steps for your project.

Engaging with IJYI brings fresh perspectives and a new approach along with our experience from a range of industries. Find out more and book a 5 day sprint with IJYI.