Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Prototyping activities

Plan, prepare, and conduct prototyping activities.

What are prototyping activities?

Prototyping activities are designed to quickly test different hypotheses about potential design and technical solutions. Whether you’re trying to define your MVP or define a release in the Learn and Improve phase, your objective is to identify potential issues — and learn from them — while you still have time to make corrections.

There’s not a one-size-fits-all set of hypotheses to test during specific Digital Delivery phases. But successful teams tend to use design sprints to prototype and test their hypotheses.

A design sprint takes 1-2 weeks and is designed to solve important design or business challenges. Each design sprint starts with brainstorming activities that lead to a prototype that is tested with real users — all within the span of 1-2 weeks.

Identify your goals

Begin by identifying your team’s goals. Consider these questions:

  • Based on your research findings, what kinds of solutions make the most sense in terms of meeting your users’ needs?

  • Which of those would you like to move forward with and test?

  • What are the biggest design risks in those solutions?

  • What are the biggest technical risks in those solutions?

  • What are the biggest business or policy risks in those solutions?

  • What are your hypotheses about those risks and solutions?

Return to top

Plan your design sprints

Based on the goals and hypotheses you’ve identified, map out your design sprints during this phase.

  • Each design sprint takes 1-2 weeks. Because each design sprint involves talking with your users, plan some extra time for recruiting and screening activities, as well as analysis and synthesis activities. For example, in an 8-week period, you might (realistically) do 3-5 design sprints.

  • Don’t test all your hypotheses at once. Target each design sprint to specific hypotheses.

  • Test the most risky hypotheses first — the ones that, if your hypothesis is proven wrong, will derail your solution concept.

  • Test your design/user experience hypotheses — for example, a single-page vs multi-page user flow.

  • Test your technical hypotheses — for example, whether a specific Vets-API provides data in the format you need.

Return to top

Conduct a design sprint

  1. Review — review current goals, hypotheses, and solution concepts with your team.

  2. Sketch — use individual and group brainstorming activities to explore design solutions that will test your hypotheses.

  3. Decide — select a single option to prototype.

  4. Prototype — create a a simple prototype to test the solution (see Prototyping Tips).

  5. Test — test the prototype with real users and collect their feedback.
    • Your goal is to iterate quickly. So make sure you plan far enough in advance to recruit participants for each design sprint.

  6. Analyze — assess the user feedback and decide how it impacts your solution concept.

  7. Plan — plan your next design sprint incorporating what you’ve just learned into the next prototype.
    • Involve all team members in prototyping. This leads to better design outcomes and helps the team create a common understanding of the service.
  8. Keep iterating with your design sprints until your prototypes meet the goals you’ve identified.
    • For the Build and Test phase, this means meeting your users’ basic needs for the MVP launch.
    • For later releases, this means meeting the User Stories you identified for the release.