Research Sprint
Why research sprints are important?
When you start a new project, you have lots of questions. Who is the customer? What problem are we trying to solve? Is there a market for this solution? Can people use the product? Do they find it useful?
Research sprints are a fast and reliable way to answer important questions and discover unfulfilled needs. It reduces risk and helps the team move in the right direction quickly and become confident about design choices that need to be made. And what’s even better, you only need just a few days.
You can use research sprint to prepare for a design sprint, as a kickstart of a new project or as a design spike in between regular sprints.
A research sprint can help you to:
- Emphasise with your users and learn what drives them
- Challenge the ideas and assumptions of your product owner(be a worthy opponent)
- Find the details and nuances you need to define the right problem statement
- Get everybody behind an idea and in front of the user
How to conduct a research sprint
At Hike One, we believe in just enough research. Therefore, we made sure you’ll need almost no prepration before you can start with the sprint.
Here is a example of a day to day breakdown of the activities. Feel free to adjust the schedule to better fit the research needs of your specific project:
- Day 1- Understand goals: organise a kick-off meeting, interview stakeholders, map your research questions, prepare your research plan and recruit users.
- Day 2 & 3 - Do the research: get out of the building, interview customers, run usability tests, do the work. Involve the whole team.
- Day 4 - Synthesise findings: get back together, analyse the results, find patterns and form insights to improve the user experience of your product or service.
Roles
A research sprint works best when you conduct the research with the whole team. It's a strong motivator for the team to experience everything first-hand and you don’t waste any time on hand-overs when you are done.
Just make sure you’ll give everybody a role:
- Researcher - prepares the questions and conducts the interview
- Observant - Captures obserations and documents results
- Coordinator - recruits users, plans & coordinate the interviews
Choosing your weapon of choice
There are many good research methods available. Just browse our playbook and pick the one that will help you answer your research questions best. When in doubt, you can always start with a contextual inquiry. This will help you get up to speed in no time. You can always use the second research day to hone in on the specifics.
A breakdown of some research techniques you can use to learn fast:
- Use observations & contextual inquiries to learn more about the context of use
- Plan interviews with users and experts to learn more about the how & why
- Conduct a expert review or heuristic evaluation to evaluate existing products
- Run a usability test to test & improve current flows
- Try benchmarking the competitors if you want to beat the competion
- Remember you can always run a usability test with a competing product if you don’t have your own product yet
More on research
- Read the mom’s test to brush up your interviewing skills
- Learn when you should use which user research method
- Empathy maps can help you to structure your research data
- Discover all you need to know about just enough research