S2E5: Jani Cortesini - How to run design sprints virtually

Introduction

0:00Carla, I'm really uncertain at the minute. Can you help me? Yes, I can. I have a solution for you. You know what it's called? No, what is it? Designing for a new level of uncertainty. An amazing title that describes exactly what the content will be. I know. So, yeah, we're part of Repotify to interview lots of designers around the world, talk about how we can navigate this completely new level of craziness in the world.

0:32Cool, I guess I'll probably subscribe and listen to that as well. Yeah, definitely enjoy Season 2 of Design Untangled.

0:45I'm Chris Mears. And I'm Carla Lindarte. We're two UX designers. And we hate jargon. So, we're here to help you untangle the world of design. Cut through the crap and talk about what really matters. Yes, solving people's problems. Welcome to Design Untangled.

Host Introduction

1:07Hello, everyone, and welcome to Design Untangled with me, Carla Lindarte, and my lovely friend, Chris Mears. And today, we have a very special guest, Gianni Cortesini. Who is a creative strategist at Google Zoo. And he can explain to us a little bit more what that actually means. Welcome, Gianni. Thank you for being with us today. Thank you for having me. That's amazing. So, today, obviously, we've been talking about uncertainty and talking about what's going on in the world

1:39and how different teams and different places have started to use different methods to collaborate and work, especially when everyone is working from home.

Design Sprints Introduction

1:50So, today, we're going to focus more about Design Sprints, which is what Gianni has been doing for many, many years. But before we start, just tell us, Gianni, how has it been locked down for you? How are you coping?

2:05Well, how am I coping? I'm learning a lot about myself and everyone around me. I think we were saying it's sort of when you're thrown into an extreme state, you get a lot of insight into what's working and what isn't working. And one of the classic sort of user interview exercises that we've sometimes done, and I think this came from Idea or someone, I can't remember, but basically having extreme users to speak to. So, someone who has an extreme perspective on a problem

2:37because they give you a much more insightful perspective. And now we're all living in an extreme world, so learning a lot. So, I guess I'm trying to, as everyone is, put a positive spin on it and learning a lot about myself. Oh, that's good. I know Carla works there as well, but I've never really understood what she actually does at Google Zoo. No one actually understands what I do. Yeah, maybe you can enlighten us on what happens there. Right, so what happens in the mysterious zoo? Yeah, lots of animals running around.

3:09No, so what we essentially are is we're a creative team at Google and we exist to help Google's advertisers be creative and effective on any platform that Google operates and technology. So, that spans all the way from YouTube to display advertising search to machine learning, augmented reality, voice interfaces, you name it. Any tech that Google's involved in.

3:41And if there's a brand that's interested in exploring it to solve a specific business challenge, then we'll help them navigate through that. And the way we do that is by running our version of a design sprint, which is called a machine sprint. And so we work through the business problem, insights, ideas, all the way to initial prototypes. And then sort of launch them on and keep consulting if they need any help beyond that. So, yeah, that's essentially what the zoo is.

4:12And in terms of who is in the zoo, so you've got a broad range of skill sets. So I'm a strategist, like Carla is when she'll be coming back. We've got creatives. We've got creative technologists. We've got producers who are a little bit like project managers for the programs that we run. And then you've got sort of client partners that handle the client relationship. So it's sort of a standalone unit within the Google universe

4:45that helps advertisers do amazing things at Google Tech. Oh, that sounds good. That sounds good, like as a job I applied for and then left and then haven't come back to. Hopefully I've sold it well enough that you're happy to come back. At least you know where your job is now, right? Yeah, I know where my job is.

5:08No, very excited to come back.

Design Sprint Problems

5:11So obviously we talked about Design Sprint and perhaps for people who haven't worked with Design Sprint or haven't heard about Design Sprint and also in the context of the work that you do, which is more on the advertising side. So what problems do Design Sprint solve? So you mean in terms of what problems do they solve for advertisers or you mean just in general? In general and also in your experience working with advertisers.

5:41So I think the scale of challenges that we work on, they'll go from anything related to an advertising challenge, so anything about raising awareness or consideration for a specific brand, all the way to, okay, how do we design a voice experience or how can we reinvent our app using machine learning or whatever it might be? And when you look at such a broad range of challenges, I think what's really interesting is,

6:13and it's kind of become sort of a philosophy for me in terms of how I try and live my life as well, the Sprint sort of pushes this way of thinking, which we call bias for action, that you try and get to something, even though it's not perfect, as quickly as possible. And I think when we run sessions, we have obviously a little bit of conversation and discussion, but I think a lot of the focus is on, okay, well, let's get it down on paper or now that we're remotely on a slide and find that when things have been written down,

6:47somehow you've applied a different level of thinking to it and it's so much easier then to see the pros and cons of a concept once it's out of your head than when you're just talking and talking and talking and going around in circles and potentially not getting anywhere. So I think in terms of one of the major challenges it's solved is just getting somewhere concrete. That, again, might not be perfect, but at least it's something tangible. And I think something tangible definitely helps innovation and helps things move forward. So I think that's going to be one of the biggest problems.

7:19And then in terms of us as a team, it's given us the opportunity to work with lots of different brands, which has been amazing. I think previously we used to have maybe longer engagement with an individual brand, a few months working with a specific brand on their project, which is great and exciting, but now you get to work with 12 or 15 per quarter, right? So the impact that you can have on the industry, on the world is so much greater because the methodology is so much quicker and faster.

7:52So I think then when you look at it from the point of view of the clients and brands that we work with, then for them also to be able to get to something concrete in such a short amount of time, obviously brings massive benefits. And it starts to then seep in and become a way of working for them as well. Because you think, oh, well, actually it is possible to maybe, you know, in two or three days, get to some sort of a prototype. It doesn't have to take weeks or months. And you start influencing then cultures

8:22and the way organizations work. And, you know, that's very exciting. You know, it's a whole new way that humanity can operate. So I think speed to get to something that's not perfect and then improve it as you go along, I think is the problem that it has solved.

Challenges with Design Sprints

8:40Yeah, I'm interested to talk a bit more about some of the challenges with design sprints. So outside of Google, I've worked at a few places that have sort of tried to use them. And I think they've run into a few kind of cultural challenges in that the organization itself wasn't almost fully bought into the idea of, you know, user-centered design in the first place, which obviously, you know, made it a bit more challenging. Sometimes they weren't prepared for the amount of time and focus

9:11that they needed from their different stakeholders to actually take part in the sprint over however long it ended up being. So, yeah, you mentioned that one of the challenges clients have is just not being able to get something down almost. Are there any other kind of problems you've seen with implementation or actually running the design sprints across your clients? Yeah, well, I think that's sort of one of the problems. It's one of those things that until you've experienced it, you don't really believe that it can work.

9:43And so it's true that in many companies, there's this sense of like, oh, surely we can't do this in two days and surely it needs to take longer and we need to think. So I think that is a difficulty. I think still some of the other challenges is making sure there's the right people in the room. I think especially the more complex the problem is, it's important that all the right stakeholders are in there and feeding in and making sure that you get their buy-in in the session because that's one of the things

10:14that enables you to move quickly that the people that have a strong stake in whatever you're producing can be there, see it happening and can give you a point of view. And it's not always possible, which is a challenge. And then I think it's probably a brand problem related maybe to the first point I made that we're calling it sprints, but it is a workshop and I think the word workshop still has a negative brand. I think people see it as having lots of colorful post-its on the wall,

10:46but then walking out of there and nothing happens. And so there's this sense of, oh, it's just a waste of time, right? And I think that's a challenge if you're working on the inside of a company trying to work in this way, it's understandable that you might get lots of pushback. Like, really, does this work? So the best advice is starting with small, small little projects, prove that it works because it's so powerful when people experience it and they're like, oh my God, I could do this, could do that. That's the best way to sort of sell in

11:17and get people to believe in a new way of working. Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, when sprints go wrong is when, as you said, you don't have the right stakeholders and it happens in agencies a lot and is when they actually just end up being lots of post-it notes on the wall, which it's happened to me in my experience many times. And it is because of the lack of stakeholder buy-in. So, you know, I think we, at the zoo, we're lucky that we normally get,

11:48well, at least in my experience, a short experience working at the zoo that we do have the right stakeholders in the room, but it's not always the case, isn't it? I also think that, obviously, sprints require a lot of facilitation, right? It kind of depends on whoever or whoever people are facilitating the workshop to kind of get to the right point and also the power everyone giving together and, you know, brainstorming and working together in groups and then showing, like, you know, showing back, etc. But obviously,

12:19throughout the pandemic and you guys working remotely, I don't know how you've been doing it because it's tough, isn't it? It would be really tough to actually get to an outcome when you're not physically with the people in the room. Yeah, so that's interesting. It's been sort of one of those things that at the beginning, back in, when was it? Back in March, there was a sort of like, oh, how the hell are we going to do this? You know, I think everyone

12:49felt that way, whether it was even just working remotely, let alone doing sprints, right? But I think to sort of live by the philosophy of the sprint, I think we quickly put together a, not even a prototype, a hypothesis of how it could work and tested it out. And surprisingly, we learned quickly. I think that was one of the biggest things of trying to figure out how things could work as smoothly as possible and then iterate it as we got along.

13:19But I think we just jumped in. And I think some of the biggest, the biggest hurdles are, you know, obviously the tech setup and making sure that that's 100% clear from the beginning so you don't waste any time figuring out how person X accesses document Y or this, whatever. So you can just hit the ground running when you enter the sprint as being critical. So one of the most useful things is just doing something as simple as just checking the tech

13:50before we jump in so that everyone's 100% clear and there's no time wasted. I think the other sort of unknown, which I think we're still figuring out, is how long you can actually stare at a screen.

14:05I think we initially, we're still kind of working with this assumption that it has to be a little bit shorter than it would be in person because I think there's been studies, I mean, don't quote me on this, I'm not an expert, but studies that it takes a lot more cognitive effort to figure out what people are doing because you can't fully see their body language so your brain has to work a lot harder like, oh, are people agreeing, disagreeing, do they like me, do they hate me, or whatever it might be, right? So it feels more tiring. So it sort of cut in half

14:36the amount of time that we dedicate compared to when we do things in person and so that's meant more focus which in a weird way, you know, sometimes, you know, focus has made us realize that maybe sometimes doing things in person where, you know, maybe we were taking a little bit too long, maybe it could have been quicker and so at the moment we're still running with this model of trying to do things in a shorter amount of time. I think as time goes on and again,

15:06I don't have the actual answer, I think we're still figuring this out, I think maybe when it comes to more complex, really tricky problems that require a lot of back and forth and a lot of discussion from a group, maybe, and again, this is just a hypothesis, maybe still in person, you can't beat that. It's a little bit trickier to facilitate a good discussion from an overall group when you're in a remote setting just because you can't see the body language and you can't see

15:37what people are saying, you don't really know how they're feeling and instead if you're in the room with them you know exactly what's going on and it's easier to sort of riff ideas, throw things around and then obviously having a tangible white wall that you can stick stuff, draw stuff on immediately when you get a thought is a lot more spontaneous and easy than maybe what you can do digitally. So we'll see, I think it might be a case of we just need to get used to it as human beings and it might be that our brains will quickly switch on and we'll be absolutely fine.

16:08I think we're still figuring it out but at the moment it's working surprisingly well, probably better than expected but let's see for the trickier more complicated problems. I don't know, we're still figuring that out. Yeah, I mean that's interesting because design sprints are famously you know very compressed time scales anyway almost by design so yeah you're now having to actually shrink it even further

16:38but still get the same value out of it so yeah it'll be interesting to see what the impacts of that are long term I guess. Yeah just looking to get your thoughts really like is there any tech or tools that you've been using that you felt have helped enable that kind of bit you miss by being there in person so like you know Miro or I guess any of the Google Suite stuff presumably you're using

17:08quite heavily but are there any particular good tools or good ways that you're able to facilitate those workshops in different ways? Well funnily enough although there's there's a lot of amazing amazing stuff out there I think for for ease and to sort of reduce the learning curve for some of the partners that we work with who may not have worked in this way before I think literally using we often use

17:39Google Slides as the foundation of where everything happens within a sort of a slide presentation that's every team will have their own workbook there'll be a main presentation that we all work in that everyone has access to and that is the collaboration space because it's just been because it's so similar to tools that people have used in the past it's a lot easier to pick up and run with so to be honest with you I haven't actually tried that much many of the others it's probably something that maybe we should do but we

18:09try to keep that barrier sort of as low as possible so that anyone no matter what your skill set is you can basically jump in and be able to contribute to the sprint so you talked about obviously very briefly about the possibly a positive thing about doing remote sprint sorry design sprint remotely which is obviously be more effective and quicker in some of the tasks is there anything else that you think is actually better by running

18:41them in that way it's sort of like two sides of the coin right there's something I don't have any data to back this up this is highly subjective but it's this idea that while it takes effort to stare at a screen it also does take effort to get somewhere physical like I think when we were doing sprints in person there's a location that we always used to do them from and getting the tube there the bus there you might

19:11be late you get they're all flustered there's something nice about kind of spontaneously being able to jump into your home office now that we've had a few months to get used to that way of working and I'm kind of seeing also with some of the partners that we work with that you start to get comments like I'm actually liking the fact that I can be anywhere in my home and jump in on

19:42right I think sometimes when you do prints physically you know it's at someone's office or someone's workshop space you know it takes a little bit to get used to the environment and that has an influence on your creativity and how comfortable you feel and how brave you feel with the ideas that you might put forward I'm often kind of contributing ideas whilst I'm in the shower you know throwing some post-it notes out there exactly there you go right so I think that's kind of maybe an unexpected

20:12benefit who knows might be getting better thinking from people because they're in a place that they feel 100% comfortable yeah I was going to ask that question actually because I'm actually a quite shy person believe it or not and in a workshop environment I always get a bit worried about what other people are saying or whether the others have better ideas

20:37running workshops in this way that perhaps more people everyone had the chance to participate or is it always you know there's always certain personalities that kind of take over a little bit in a workshop environment or do you think now it's a bit more balanced because everyone has their turn to talk well I think I think that depends on facilitation whether it's remote or in person I think making sure that everyone gets a voice I don't

21:07necessarily feel that it's made a huge difference remotely or in person I think someone who's loud and opinionated is going to behave in that way no matter what context you're in but I think a lot of it comes into how you design the session and simple things that you might have covered before but making sure everyone has individual time to do their own thinking so then everyone gets to share their own thinking and it's not sort of the classic brainstorming of okay who wants to

21:38say their idea first no it's more of a structured give everyone a voice kind of approach which has worked remotely as well that being said though as I was saying earlier I think facilitating a broader discussion with a group with larger group of people is just difficult full stop either you can't see them properly you can't maybe detect how they're feeling as a result and therefore the facilitation becomes a little bit trickier because I think when you're in person you can maybe understand where the energy is

22:09where the power dynamics are and you can play around with that remotely you're a little bit more detached and so maybe it has been more difficult for certain kinds of personalities I don't know but then on the other hand the screen is also I'm a little bit more on the introvert side as well believe it or not and the screen does act as a little bit of a protection right I think it's a lot more kind of in your face literally when you're in person and I think when you're behind the screen

22:40like I was at home and you're protected so maybe at least when it comes to me maybe you feel even more compelled to share more because you know someone's not looking at you and I know there's been studies around because there's been some companies that have been working remotely even before the pandemic and one of the things that they realized is that it's interesting it's sort of it becomes less about you know appearance and clothes and all these things that create

23:10first impressions when you meet in person when you're remotely because pretty much 70% of your body is cut off it really becomes a lot more about what you say rather than what you look like or whatever which is some of these things that we gravitate to as human beings so yeah I mean with all these things I don't really know I think we're still figuring it out but I think giving a voice to everyone I think that is a core facilitation thing whether it's remote or in person

23:40cool so I just wanted to talk

Remote Design Sprints

23:43about prototyping a bit so that's obviously a core part of a design sprint how has that changed as a factor of being remote and also following on from that how has that affected how you actually get to validate these prototypes because it's a lot more difficult or impossible to sit face to face with customers now potentially so how does the whole prototype and testing phase work now in the new world well

24:14one of the things that that again it's always two sides of the coin one of the things that has worked well is that you know whether you're working on an app or whatever kind of digital experience or a video storyboard I think we've been a lot more methodical about including the visual assets and collecting those visual assets from when we're preparing the sprint so that when people

24:44get to that point in the sprint they have a lot of building blocks to start building something off the back of I think when we were in person sometimes we did that sometimes we didn't because there was always this feeling of oh we can just draw it somehow and whatever we'll figure it out but now because drawing and things like that are a lot more difficult I think having some sort of visual assets to play with has become a lot more critical in terms of getting individuals to test stuff and so forth I think

25:14that hasn't been too difficult I think we have been we've had people test things remotely via video call before so now it's in a remote sprint rather than also being in person so it's kind of been okay that hasn't been impacted too much but that having been said we've been doing a lot less prototyping I think we've kind of the way we work our methodology is that we kind of stop at a let's call it a pre-prototype so it

25:45might be a few mock-ups of some key screens on a mobile app it might be a very basic storyboard well before we might have gone maybe a step further in terms of the impact that that's had I don't know on one hand because we're doing everything digitally in slides I think the partners that we work with can literally hit the ground running and it's a lot easier to translate and understand the output of a sprint when it's already in a digital format I think before we'd have lots of drawings or paper prototypes and then transferring those yes you

26:15could do a video but that didn't always work or transferring them into a digital format isn't something that always happens so it was a lot more complicated so there's pros and cons but I guess we've been prototyping a little bit less but when we have been doing it actually has been quite sort of effective well you guys obviously google invented design springs and when you read the book it was this magic methodology that working with

26:46startups we have the best set up to be running a week worth of workshops with all the steps etc but obviously everyone interprets design springs in different ways and google zoo has actually done their own version of it so tell us a little bit about that kind of transformation and evolution I would say of the design springs since you

27:16started working with that methodology until now obviously with remote springs whatever even before covid how design springs have changed in terms of methodology based on the needs of your clients so where to where to begin I think sort of the design the pure let's call it the pure design sprint as it is in the book and how it was intended is