Challenge solved: Storyboarding in Remote Design Sprints

A Design Sprint is a compact, multi-day workshop to go from a vague idea to a concrete product.

English edition — originally published in German as Challenge solved: Storyboarding im Remote Design Sprint.

Context

A Design Sprint is a compact multi-day workshop to go from a vague idea to a concrete product. In a broadly assembled team, we get to the bottom of the problem and jointly create the solution, which is then immediately tested with the target group.

At Deep Impact, we have been using this popular method from Google Ventures for three years now, and the results delight users and clients alike. The transition to Remote Design Sprints a year ago was very easy for us thanks to digital tools like Mural, but storyboarding never quite convinced us remotely.

Problem

After the team has decided on the solution to pursue after the "Ideation Phase", the next step is to concretize the idea in a storyboard. The Prototype Test Flow (i.e., the process used in testing to validate hypotheses) is depicted in 10-12 steps. In an on-site Design Sprint, we use the huge whiteboard in our office for this.

During the Remote Design Sprint, we work with Mural – and we love the virtual whiteboard. However, for storyboarding, where the goal is to turn a sketch into a wireframe, it offers too few possibilities for us.

Storyboarding on site vs. remote

Why does on-site storyboarding work much better than online? We realized that on-site, we often take the lead and visualize the team's ideas and discussions live. It's a guided creative session with the team that quickly leads to visual results.

As you can clearly see here, this is also how Design Sprints were originally conceived. Jake Knapp, co-author of "Sprint," guides the team through the storyboarding process.

Solution

Shouldn't this also work online? After the unsatisfactory results with Mural, we had the idea to do the storyboarding directly in Figma – and there are wonderful tools for that. Aleksandra found one of them in the Figma Community, a wireframe template.

Sketched ideas as an introduction to storyboarding

We transformed the sketches created during the ideation phase and selected as favorites by the "Decider" in the Art Museum into a story (Prototype Test Flow).

Storyboarding with Figma

We were able to quickly assign the individual steps of the story to the storyboard, and we also copied the selected sketches directly into Figma, as a valid reference, so to speak. We divided the story into four important sequences – we assigned the first two to one team each. From Zoom, we split into two breakout rooms, and two Figma and Design Sprint professionals each guided their teams through the storyboarding. To maintain focus, the two moderators shared their screen with a view of Figma and actively encouraged participants to discuss and interact.

Day 3: the prototype is ready and testing can begin

Only one day is allocated for prototyping. Everything must be in place on this day so that a 10-20-page prototype is ready by the evening. Thanks to the storyboard in Figma, prototyping was much clearer from the start in this case and therefore significantly more relaxed. This allowed us to incorporate additional ideas that were hotly debated during the Design Sprint towards the end of the day.

Learnings

• Keep wireframes as low fidelity as possible: Comic Sans font and a concept color are sufficient
• For the person creating the storyboard, it is helpful to be proficient in Figma to make quick progress
• With parallel working groups, it's cool to be able to occasionally glimpse the results of others and thus ensure the story is consistent
• The prototyping day is much more relaxed because the solution is already very well formulated by the end of day 2

If you want to learn more about Design Sprints and how we approach them: sprints@deep-impact.ch