Remote Design Sprints: The Developer’s Perspective

The first two weeks of My Best Life were altered to deal with the situation around COVID-19. Working out how to guide the participants through a design sprint, with the added challenge of doing so remotely, was a learning curve for us and allowed us to discover some really useful online tools.

Designing the exercises for both the design sprint itself, and also for onboarding young people and youth organisations to using Miro and Zoom was a group effort. Through collaboration, feedback and evaluation we are proud of having produced a series of effective workshops and learning tools.

Moving from a room full of people bouncing ideas to encouraging the same quality of discussion in a virtual space has been an interesting adjustment. There are challenges in replicating the same spirit of open communication, but together we managed to redefine our planned process, and so far we have managed to maintain the same level of output one might expect from an in-person sprint. There are also advantages to the remote process in focussing time and attention. As a result, most of what is discussed is noted down, whereas in person points can get lost in tangential conversation.

As the development team for this part of the project, we will be producing user-testable prototypes based on the problem areas we have explored in each sprint. Hearing the initial ideas from the sprint team – charity partners, young people and NPC has got us thinking about the direction that a prototype might take, and what solutions might look like from a technical perspective. This has encouraged us to explore certain things in our own tech research and we are excited to see what shape the solution to each sprint problem will take.

Jamie & Beth

Founders and Coders