Case Study
Design Sprint
The starting point
Transforming from a traditional media house to the leading digital publisher in Europe, Axel Springer is a media and technology company active in more than 40 countries. The corporate website mainly served the company's journalistic pier. It primarily aided members of the press by offering corporate content, press releases and press contacts.
Due to the wide range of business areas, we were faced with the challenge that a broad user group uses the corporate website with different motives. Our goal was to filter out these primary users and create a multifunctional site that served multiple needs.
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5 Days Design Sprint
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Mathias Döpfner
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Sprint Facilitator
Product Design
Tech Consultancy
Introducing the method
As a leading digital media and technology company with more than 16,000 employees worldwide, optimizing the company's website was a high priority and required quick action for change. We chose the Design Sprint method because it allowed us to understand a challenge, brainstorm, develop multiple ideas, and test the most promising one - all within just four business days.
Design Sprints were originally conducted within five working days, but have been optimized and reduced to four days, as it is often a challenge to give participants five full days off from their daily work. After all, this is one of the most important rules for a successful design sprint: it is essential and non-negotiable that the sprint team can focus on the sprint without the pressure of their regular work. This design sprint was completed within five days, and our sprint team consisted of journalists, marketing experts, graphic designers, developers, and UX designers.
We recapped each workshop day with our facilitator's tips. You can use them for any workshop format.
Day 1: Understand the challenge
The first day is for the group to understand the challenge and get aligned with the goal of the sprint. As a designer, you need to understand the current state before thinking about solutions. This is also true for design sprints. We conducted expert interviews to ask other members of the corporate communications team who could not participate in the sprint, but whose input and knowledge were important for us to gain a full understanding. In addition, we captured the current state and translated the weaknesses we uncovered into How Might We questions (HMWs). HMWs are a helpful approach in Design Thinking to shift participants' thinking in a problem-solving direction. Instead of being overwhelmed by all the problems that arise, you start thinking about how to solve them. We end Day 1 of the Sprint with this mindset.
Facilitator Tip - Safety and Empowerment
The most important task of a facilitator on a first workshop day is to create a space of trust and safety for the participants. The team needs to feel encouraged to share and work together productively. How do you accomplish this? Communicate the sprint rules, provide enough breaks, let participants be completely relieved of their daily work by their managers, and provide enough healthy snacks!
Day 2 - Generate Ideas
On the second day, we want to find the answers to our HMWs. We conduct market research and do lightning demonstrations. We want to encourage the sprint teams to look at direct competitors and products that may not do the same job 1:1, but could help them think outside the box. After sharing research findings as a group, individual time begins for participants to brainstorm ideas: We do this in three steps:
We quickly sketch basic ideas with crazy 8s.
Everyone has time to write down their thoughts and draw more detailed solutions.
Each team member decides on their best solution and works it out at an understandable level that requires no explanation to the other participants.
Facilitator Tip - Reflect: It is important to recap what was learned on the first day and have the team reflect. Ask if there are any ambiguities about certain things or if there are some points the team would like to add/change that guided them before they begin the second day.
Day 3 - Go for one
On the third day, we decide on an idea: the one that best solves our challenge. We do this in several rounds of voting. First, we vote on great details and ideas in each team member's proposal. This voting iteration allows us to discuss in a solution-oriented way and highlight ideas that we want to keep in our backlog. Nothing gets thrown away. Everything is documented and can be reused. Even after the sprint!
Tip from the facilitator: divide the responsibilities: Everything is time-bound! On the third day, the team has to decide on an idea. As the facilitator, you need to stimulate the discussion while keeping a tight timing. The timer and agenda (which should hang in the room for all to see) are great tools for keeping strict timelines. Another effective technique is to designate one person on the sprint team to be responsible for the time. This commits the team as well as you to be accountable for the agenda.
Day 4 - Prototype
On the fourth day we create a prototype of the selected idea. Usability testing can already be done with paper prototypes; they do not necessarily have to be advanced and created with design programs. It is important that the prototypes are detailed enough to be understandable to users.
Facilitator Tip - Plan the route before you start running: Before prototyping, the test script needs to be agreed upon. What are the most important questions we want the usability test to answer? This will define the test tasks for your users and determine the flow you need to create for the prototype.
Day 5: Testing
We propose to conduct the usability tests ourselves to ensure valid test results for our customers. The Sprint team can view and document the user feedback. We ran the test with six users to see if we could find any recurring weaknesses. User-centered design is about testing early and often. The design sprint is a fully user-centered methodology that ends with the findings from the tests and the actions derived from them.
Moderation tip - Test the test: An absolute must for every usability test is to conduct a pilot test. With a pilot test you check if the prototype and the script work or if adjustments are necessary. If you discover this during the actual testing and need to change your test setup, you create different test environments. This leads to incomparable results and an invalid test overall.
Prototype - The new corporate website of Axel Springer
After the Sprint
During the design sprint, the team came up with several great ideas. The concept selected and tested focused on a landing page that targets the largest user group (applicants) by telling stories about employees and offering authentic and diverse insights into the company. For the second user group (the press), the new concept created an area that is easily accessible from the landing page via a full-screen menu. The press area offers concrete professional content and contact options for the press.
Team UX, Nov. 23, 2022