Phase 1: Understand

The first phase of the Design Sprint is Understand. The goal with this phase is to create a shared understanding of the problem space across all sprint team members. There are a number of different ways that this understanding can be captured and shared, but we’ll focus on just a few in this course.

You’ll want to set up inputs that highlight and demonstrate different viewpoints and perspectives across a multitude of dimensions. You can do this using the following techniques:

• Lightning talks
  • User research
  • Business goals/needs
  • Technology
  • and more
• Interviews
  • User interviews
  • Stakeholder interviews
  • Expert interviews
• Competitive analysis

You’ll guide the team through responding to these inputs and capturing their responses through the following methods:

• How Might We
• Rose Bud Thorn
• Affinity Mapping
• and more

Topics and Learning Objectives

In this lesson, we’ll cover the following topics:

• The Understand phase of the Design sprint
• Creating inputs to get a deeper understanding
• Responding to inputs through design thinking methods
  • How Might We
  • Rose Bud Thorn
• Identifying themes and related ideas through affinity mapping

At the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to:

• Describe the Understand phase of the Design Sprint
• Describe how lightning talks can be used as an input during the Understand phase
• Describe how interviews can be used as an input during the Understand phase
• Describe how competitive analysis can be used as an input during the Understand phase
• Use the “How Might We” method to identify opportunities
• Use the “Rose Thorn Bud” method to classify things as positive, negative, or opportunities
• Use Affinity Mapping to identify thematic insights

Glossary

Here are some of the terms we will be covering in this lesson: