Google's Design Sprint Kit
Google’s Design Relations team is always doing amazing things, and for the past three years, I’ve been lucky enough to spend two days of my week as a part of that team. As a Design Advocate, I conduct design reviews on Android apps, facilitate design sprints with business partners, and create resources and events to educate the design community.
The most impactful resource I’ve worked on as an advocate is redesigning Google’s Design Sprint Kit. Sprints allow teams to collaboratively solve complex business problems in a matter of days using a framework guided by design thinking:
I shepherded the kit’s redesign process from the user research phase to the final editorial process for new content. This project required information restructuring based on user findings, framing out the complete site for a development assessment, applying an updated visual language, and making graphics to fit in all the gray boxes. I thoroughly enjoy ushering projects from sketch to launch in this way and my process for doing so can be applied to many other complex problems.
Our goal with the redesign was threefold:
Explain the sprinting framework to new audiences
Outline the steps to plan a sprint
Showcase the variety of the framework’s methodologies
These messages weren’t being clearly conveyed by the current site:
After interviewing sprint facilitators both inside and outside Google, I worked with a fellow advocate to restructure the Design Sprint site’s architecture to be useful to both expert facilitators and sprint novices:
After building wireframes from this restructure, I established a visual style for the site that comfortably fit into Google’s visual universe:
As an in-tandem process, I also created an identity for the Design Sprints initiative for internal and external uses:
As much as I love the exploratory beginnings of a project, nothing is quite as satisfying as getting designs out into the world and in front of new users. I ushered the designs through the development phase, created graphics and icons to complete the site, and helped the team field and edit new content to keep the kit community-driven and relevant:
Check out the living, growing kit here:
