UX Crunch Manchester: Design Sprints

Design Sprints were born out of Google Ventures. There has been a lot of buzz around the idea of Design Sprints but what are they, and should you be running them?

We'll be joined by:

Mark Shahid - Lead UX Architect - Sky Betting & Gaming

Charles Rice - Head of Design - The Start-Up Factory

James Ferguson - Lead UX Designer - On The Beach

TICKET ONLY EVENT: http://bit.ly/2Qqsb9C

Please make sure you purchased a ticket to secure your place. Price includes entry to the event, plus drinks and Pizza. Tickets are NON-REFUNDABLE as we have to purchase the correct amount of pizza and drink.

OUR PARTNERS

Keep It Usable

http://www.keepitusable.com/

ECOM Recruitment

https://www.interquestgroup.com/specialisms/ecom

TALKS & DISCUSSIONS

Charles Rice - Head of Design - The Start-Up Factory

Charles is a Designer with years of intense experience building and designing digital products and services with users at their core, from miniature smartwatch apps to distributed enterprise solutions. He’s the Head of Design at The Start Up Factory – a business focused on helping people startup, or scale up their ideas into high growth ventures. He organises the “Design Sprint: Manchester” Meetup group, is published in uxdesign.cc and is a featured speaker at Product School. His latest claim to fame is being a named test reader in Jake Knapp’s (creator of the Design Sprint) latest book: Make Time.

The recommended Design Sprint team is 4-7 people. What happens if you’re a solo founder? What happens if you’re a solo Facilitator? Can you run a Sprint with just one Founder and one Facilitator? At tsf.tech we’ve done our research and gone through several iterations to test out just how minimal we can make a Design Sprint team without compromising on the quality of the learnings and speed of execution.

Mark Shahid - Lead UX Architect - Sky Betting & Gaming

Mark is currently Lead UX Architect at Sky Betting and Gaming, Leeds. Working in cross-function Agile product teams, Mark and his team have focused the last 18 months on nurturing a healthy environment for good design practices whilst fostering a strong design culture of innovation in an agile environment. Over the last 10 years Mark has worked on various UX/Digital projects for organisations such as Sky, GE, MTV, Holland and Barrett, Nokia and Molson Coors.

Mark will go through a few common pitfalls of design sprints, including a few preconceptions and how to avoid them. Why do we often overlook some key principles despite well-published guidelines? How do handle difficult stakeholders and conversations within the sprints? Mark will demonstrate some real world examples about how design sprints can lack impact when executed without key considerations.

James Ferguson - Lead UX Designer - On The Beach

James has lead the User Experience team at On The Beach since February 2017. In that time, the team have championed and adopted the Design Thinking process across the business (not just in design) and revolutionised the way new projects are approached and delivered. His background includes working with global brand names like Gatorade, Michelin, and Esso and in helping start ups get concepts off the whiteboard and into the App Store, whilst all the time instilling a culture of constant improvement and user focus.

What do you do when you can’t sprint in 5 days? What do you do if you don’t have to sprint in 5 days? Is a 5 day sprint too limiting in itself? At On the Beach they push the boundaries and their own limits in order to achieve their goals and objectives. With that in mind, they take the theory of design sprinting and stretch it out over longer periods in order to ensure success...