Why Giant Sketches Didn’t Work
Lesson learned from running GV style Design Sprint
When Jake Knapp, Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky released the Sprint book in March this year — concluding the eternal wait — we were excited to try the ideas introduced at Cambio, as many of our pre-Sprint book Design Sprints were not successful as expected. This is the first post-Sprint book blog from the series of blogs based on our experience in running design sprints at Cambio office in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Design Sprint is 5-day process invented and masters in Google and GV that enables to build and test ideas. Each day revolves around a theme that resembles Stanford Design Thinking principles. Read more about the design sprint.
Reading The Sprint book feels like reading Harry Potter all over again, such an adventure.
At the end of the day 2, the Sprint participants need to create a three-panel storyboard by sketching in three sticky notes on a sheet of paper, which is going to be pasted on the wall known as Art Museum, to create discussion on day 3.
The book specifically says “3 X 5 Sticky Notes” and “A4 or letter size paper”, However, due to a mix-up in our shopping list - we ended up with massive 23 X 35 papers. We felt bad not to use them and ignoring the author’s advice, we replaced the Sticky Notes with A4 papers and A4 papers with gigantic 23 X 35s.
End Result, large posts at the Art Museum, as large as 8 times as they should be.
Initially, the giant sketches looked really cool giving a more hip look to the sprint room. additionally, we thought this tweak will deliver the functional value of providing more visibility to decision makers.
However, as many things in design, recommendations are there for a reason, which we had to find out the hard way.
To pile up to our ingenious mistakes we did not enlarge everything, as there were no marker pens which are 8 times larger than the normal one, we had to stick with normal whiteboard markers.
1. More space, More content
Our designers love the extra space on giant papers and they started writing more and more in their sketches violating few more rules in the Sprint book.
2. More content, More reading time
Even with greater visibility, at the art museum activity, reviewers took a longer time to read the context, reducing the time to decide on their votes.
3. More content, More things to present
Which eventually prolong the follow-up discussions as design owner wanted to explain everything in their design. As sketches were filled with text and written ideas design owners wanted to explain each and every idea they had.
Overall, the Sprint book recommendation on size is very important as it will keep designers focus on the right amount of information to be presented on their design. the precise level of balance between abstraction versus detail is very important in activities schedule for the 3rd day.
TL-DK — Stick to what Sprint book says.
Even though the moral of this write-up is to highlight the importance of sticking to what Sprint book recommends (after all those techniques have been used in 100 plus design sprints) as product designers who love experimenting we will continue to experiment and share our experience with you.
P.S — You must read the Sprint Book — it is simply a masterpiece .
