The 4 Day Course Design Sprint Challenge Process Overview and Example Debrief

Discover how to create, prototype, and test your online course or training based membership site concept with LifterLMS and Experimentor Studios. In this free training you’ll learn about the process and findings of a recent 4 day design sprint challenge we facilitated for an aspiring course creator.

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What The 4 Day Course Design Sprint Taught Us About Testing A Course Idea

This debrief breaks down LifterLMS’s first four day course design sprint, run with Experimentor Studios. You will see how the team validated a course idea from scratch: mapping the challenge, sketching solutions, building a prototype inside LifterLMS, and testing it with five real learners in just four days, plus the lessons learned for running a sharper sprint next time.

What You’ll Learn

• How a four day design sprint takes a course idea from a blank page to a tested prototype
• Why LifterLMS works as a free prototyping tool, not just a platform for finished courses
• How the team narrowed sixty raw ideas down to one focus area and one prototype
• How to prioritize user feedback with a simple impact effort scale
• What real learner testing revealed about video quality, trust, and landing page design

Key Takeaways

• Validate your course idea with a scrappy prototype before you invest months building the full thing
• Recruit unbiased testers who fit your actual audience, and consider paying them for their time
• Sort feedback into quick fixes, planned projects, and a backlog instead of reacting to all of it at once
• Keep your first prototype narrow. A smaller, sharper test beats a broad, shallow one
• If you serve more than one customer segment, run a smaller iteration sprint instead of starting over

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

What The First LifterLMS Course Design Sprint Was

Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome to this webinar training. A couple of weeks ago we did our first ever four day design sprint with Experimentor Studios, that’s Sebastian and Georgiana. I’m Chris, this is Kathy from LifterLMS, and Julie came with us as an example, going through the process. It was super cool. I learned a ton, and I know the audience did too.

If you were present for any of the four day design sprint process, let us know in the chat what your biggest takeaway was, what you learned that is going to help you in your own course creation process. This is going to be Q&A intensive at the end, so we’re lucky to have Sebastian and Georgiana here with their instructional design skills. Go ahead and drop questions as we go, and we will dig into them together once we get to the Q&A.

I’m just super stoked. That was a lot of fun. I didn’t even think it was possible to do what we did in four days, but Sebastian’s process to condense it all down into a sprint, and get that much done, that many assumptions on the table, that much creative thinking and actual testing and prototyping, all in four days, starting from zero, from knowing pretty much nothing about Julie’s business, was quite a team achievement.

We also learned a lot from our audience, from their questions. It wasn’t only us teaching and sharing knowledge and experience with the audience. It went the other way too. We learned about their problems and the way they want to be helped in their own course creation journey.

Sebastian: It was an amazing experience, and I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to share all of this with you, with your team, and with the LifterLMS community.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, let’s get into it. We’re going to do a recap of the four day course design sprint challenge, and I’m also curious to hear from you, the audience, about your interest in doing something like this again. I really think a challenge can help focus people, because there’s a lot stacked up against course creators. There’s a lot to do, a lot to figure out, and getting focused helps. Let’s see how this goes and what questions come up. So, what did we learn, Sebastian? Tell us what we did and what we can take away.

The Goal Of A Design Sprint Is A Validated Prototype, Not A Finished Course

Sebastian: We learned a lot in those four days. Let me share my screen. The first part of today is a quick recap of the workshop, highlighting mostly the outcomes for each step, not a full repeat of everything we did. After that I want to share my thoughts as the sprint facilitator, my key learnings, and open the floor for discussion with the whole team.

Let’s recap the objective, which was to validate a course idea by creating a prototype and testing it with real learners. The purpose of this workshop was not to develop a full course, just to test a course idea through prototyping and testing. A second objective was for all of us to learn how to tailor the design sprint method, because we took this method off the shelf and adapted it a bit for course creation. We are not sure we have found all the possible tailoring yet, especially for course creators working alone as solopreneurs, since the method was designed for teams.

A design sprint is a step by step method for solving big problems and testing new ideas in four or five days. The original method was designed for five days, but practitioners in this community have tailored it down to four, which is what we did. In just four days we tested a new course idea starting from zero, from understanding the overall challenge down to collecting feedback from real testers.

The problem this solves is that most people take a build, launch, and collect data cycle for building their courses and businesses, but the distance between the idea and the launch keeps growing because we want to add more content and we are not sure what kind of learning experience our learners actually want. We are building on assumptions, which is why it takes so much time, effort, and sometimes money to launch a course nobody wants. A design sprint shortcuts that cycle so you can test a course idea immediately, with minimum effort and minimum cost, just to learn if it fits your learners’ needs. Please bear in mind that a design sprint is not meant to help you develop a full course. Many people say, well, you’ve only built a prototype, but validating a prototype is probably the most important step in your full development effort. If you start developing without a validated idea, you will likely spend a lot of effort building something that has no future in the market.

The Double Diamond Framework Behind Every Design Sprint

Sebastian: Julie has been our decider and customer for this sprint. I handled the facilitation, and Georgiana and Kathy helped the team by developing the actual course prototype, contributing as course developers across all phases.

The first part of the workshop, day one and day two, was dedicated to what we call the ideation process. First we wanted to understand the challenge, then come up with sketch solutions. The following two days, day three and day four, were dedicated to the actual work: building a prototype based on the solution we sketched, and validating it by involving real learners in a test process on day four. That’s the design sprint anatomy at a glance.

We follow the Double Diamond concept, which is the conceptual core of a design sprint. It starts by transforming a generic challenge into a specific challenge through two major steps: discover the challenge, then define the specific one. Once you have a specific challenge defined, you can start developing solutions and prototypes, so you end up delivering a tested, validated prototype, which is the specific solution. Keep this Double Diamond concept in mind, because it’s the backbone of a design sprint.

The Key Roles On A Design Sprint Team

Sebastian: A few important roles. The decider is the official decision maker for the topic. We don’t decide as a team, it’s not consensus based and not a democracy. The decider, as the business owner or investor in the effort, holds the ultimate authority for everything related to the sprint. We also bring in experts for each sprint, though in many cases the expert and the decider are the same person, especially for education entrepreneurs working alone or in very small teams.

Another role is the facilitator, someone who makes sure the process is being followed, keeps time for all the exercises, and facilitates the teamwork. That’s the part I played for this design sprint.

A design sprint is built on four major principles. Together alone means we work independently across the four days, but toward the same goal, sharing individual work later. Tangible over debatable means we don’t open endless discussions without something tangible to show, like a sketch or a prototype, rather than just wasting time talking. Getting started is more important than being right, which means we want to move fast rather than second guess ourselves or try to be perfect, since a prototype is, in most cases, a fake of the final product, not the full thing. The fourth principle, don’t rely on creativity, can sound confusing. It doesn’t mean we dismiss creativity, but instead of relying on one creative hero on the team, we rely on a process that helps every team member bring their creativity in. It’s a team effort, not a search for someone who always has the right answer.

Conceptually, a design sprint has three major stages. First, understand the challenge, the questions we need to answer, framed as how might we questions, also called sprint questions. Understanding those questions leads to a storyboard, a detailed description of what needs to be prototyped. Then comes validation, which answers the initial sprint questions. That’s the whole design sprint in a single diagram.

The whole point is to validate the idea with the simplest prototype possible. We don’t want to invest weeks or months in a prototype, we want to do it in a few hours, because we actually worked about seven hours to build the whole prototype. I would rather invest seven hours in a prototype, alongside the other three days of the sprint, than invest four months building something the market never validated.

We are also not building an MVP. Some of you know the minimum viable product concept from the Lean Startup method, which is very powerful but doesn’t really tell you how to build the MVP. Instead of jumping straight to an MVP for the complete product, we start with something much smaller, the prototype. There is no contradiction between the MVP concept and design sprint. They complement each other very well.

How The Team Uncovered Sixty How Might We Questions On Day One

Sebastian: Day one was about defining the challenge and sketching solutions, through a few exercises. First, an expert interview, where we got as much learning as we could from the expert and wrote statements in the form of how might we questions. The second exercise was setting a two year goal along with sprint questions. Sprint questions are different from how might we questions in that they need to be a bit pessimistic. Whenever you set a goal you want to be optimistic and look to the future, but at the same time you need to look at the obstacles and barriers that might prevent you from getting there. Those are the sprint questions.

The last exercise in this series is called map and target, where we put all our questions on a map to identify a focus area, rather than fixing something specific right away.

For these three exercises, we collected a lot of how might we questions, around sixty of them, which is a very good result for a small team. We also formulated a pretty ambitious two year goal along with some realistic sprint questions. The goal and questions selected are marked with a green dot, since they were picked by the decider.

Mapping The Problem And Choosing A Focus Area

Sebastian: The third part of this exercise series was to create the map and put a target on it, by highlighting the focus area. We positioned all the how might we questions on a simple visual describing a learning journey, made of three major phases: discover, learn, and apply. There are more sophisticated instructional design theories out there, but for this workshop we wanted something simple and actionable in just a few hours.

We eventually concentrated the questions in a way that produced a focus area centered on the learning part, which drove the rest of the workshop. Once we had that focus area, we knew exactly what we needed to do in the remaining exercises. The purpose isn’t a perfect map or a perfect representation of the problem, it’s finding a rough target for the prototype. Most people who feel uncomfortable with this method expect accurate results or fully developed products right away. That’s not the case. We work with the bare minimum, investing minimum effort just to test an idea.

Sketching Four Possible Solutions

Sebastian: The second part of day one was producing, or sketching, solutions, done in two parts. First, lightning demos, where we collected inspiration from a variety of sources, mostly the internet, on what other people do around our topic. This exercise is usually optional, but it proved very useful here. I was a little reluctant to spend too much time on it, but I’m glad we did, because we collected a lot of useful inspiration.

We used the same discover, learn, and apply learning journey framework, with three main actors: the learner, the learning management system delivering the experience, and the instructor, since there is no such thing as one hundred percent automated learning. Learning is a human experience, and even with a lot of technology we still need the human touch.

We ended up with four sketches for models proposed by all team members. Most of them were pretty well developed, not just two or three sticky notes, which tells me we successfully applied the principles of the method. It’s not really important to judge each concept individually. The main outcome is that we followed the process and it led us to four candidate solutions to choose from, which is a good result.

That concludes day one. Day two was dedicated to the decision process and storyboarding. The decision making process is straightforward, made of two steps. In theory, team members vote on all the proposed concepts, but voting doesn’t actually make the decision, it just informs the decider. Whenever we say voting in a design sprint, it doesn’t mean the group decides by majority or consensus. We’re just expressing opinions as consultants, and the final decision rests with the decider.

How Julie Chose A Concept To Prototype

Sebastian: In our case, Julie, our decider, picked the model Georgiana initially called “Nada To Tada,” but she also pulled in an idea from another model, developed by Chris, and the two combined became “Zero To Social Media Hero.” That’s a good example of the decider picking one model but also borrowing ideas from models that weren’t selected. The particular idea Julie borrowed was related to the discover part in Chris’s model, yet another way to combine collective imagination into a more coherent solution.

Once we decided on the concept and model, we started storyboarding, done in two steps. First, we identified a minimum set of touch points between our course and the tester, what we call a user test flow. These six steps are the touch points between our course and the learner. We wanted something simple enough to develop everything in a single day, so we limited it to six steps, which decompose the three major stages, discover, learn, and apply, into something more concrete.

Storyboarding The Six Touch Points Of The Course Prototype

Sebastian: The storyboard is the next exercise, where we put actual meat on the concept that had been selected. We used a lot of visuals, text, arrows, and boxes to describe the learning experience across all six touch points. I particularly liked how Chris described his part of the storyboard through hand drawing. In an in-person, non-virtual design sprint, this is exactly how people describe a storyboard, drawing on paper or a whiteboard rather than using any software tool. The purpose of the storyboard is to serve as a blueprint for developing the prototype. The more detail you put into it, the better your chance of ending up with a functional, testable prototype.

Building The Prototype With LifterLMS And Testing It With Real Learners

Sebastian: Day three was about building the prototype. You’ve already seen what the team built, so there isn’t much point revisiting the same prototype in detail. It’s more important to focus on the results of testing, because that’s where the whole community, and Julie in particular, gets the most value out of a design sprint. Everything we did in the first three days was just a way to build up to this result.

We collected feedback from five interviews with real learners who played around with the prototype. We weren’t able to broadcast all five interviews given some privacy restrictions, since not everyone wants to be put in front of a big audience. But we were lucky enough to have one of the testers, Marcus, kindly agree to share his session in front of the audience. Marcus, if you’re watching, thank you again for making this experience more valuable for everyone.

The feedback came back as two colors of sticky notes. The green ones are definite positives, drivers you can rely on for the full product. The orange ones are things that need improvement. At first glance you might think there are way more oranges than greens, but many of those individual statements overlap, so if you curate the collection, the real number of distinct issues is smaller than it looks. Don’t read a wall of orange sticky notes as “the prototype failed.” It isn’t that simple.

The next steps for the decider are to review the aggregated test findings, prioritize them using a simple impact and effort scale, and then plan a project for designing and developing the course based on that prioritization.

How To Prioritize Feedback With The Impact Effort Scale

Sebastian: The impact effort scale is a very simple tool. The horizontal axis is the effort required to implement a fix, and the vertical axis is the impact on the learner. Small fixes with a high impact are quick fixes, and we should knock those out quickly, since usually twenty percent of the effort gets you eighty percent of the outcome. High effort, high impact items need a plan, because investing real effort benefits from some project management. Low effort, low impact items go into a backlog and get pulled in whenever you have spare capacity. High effort, low impact items are the ones you don’t want to touch for now, since they cost a lot without paying off much for the learner.

As a side note from my other job as a project management consultant, planning a project, regardless of the topic, gives you a much better chance of success. A design sprint itself is not about planning or managing a project, it’s about ideation, but once you have a result out of a sprint, the actual project work is just getting started.

What Worked Well In The First Design Sprint

Sebastian: Now for the workshop retrospective. A second objective from the start was learning how to make this method more suitable for course creators, and we learned a lot, thanks to the team and to an audience that sent us very relevant questions and feedback.

A few findings. All the exercises produced the expected outcomes, which tells me the team was able to follow and apply the method completely. That’s a very positive sign, it says the method works. The team worked well together even without prior experience, learning to collaborate within minutes. The timing was quite good too, especially given how tightly time-boxed every exercise was.

We also noticed a huge amount of interest in this topic among the course creators on the call, which is definitely positive. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the way we designed this experience didn’t provide enough engagement opportunities for the audience. Since this is first and foremost meant to be a learning opportunity for everyone, that’s something we need to tweak going forward.

Why LifterLMS Is A Free Way To Prototype A Course

Sebastian: Another finding I consider particularly valuable is that LifterLMS, as a product, can be used very successfully for prototyping, not only for building full courses. We already knew LifterLMS supports a full learning experience, but we didn’t know it could work this well for prototyping specifically. Most of the features we used in the prototype are available in the free version, which matters, because it means you can prototype without spending money on separate tools. You can use the same platform for prototyping and for full development.

Chris Badgett: When you said that, it made me smile. I hadn’t thought about it quite that way. My angle is that our heart goes out to the bootstrapping entrepreneur trying to validate with limited resources, being able to validate for free on the WordPress site they already have for their business, and then continue building on it later. It’s very low friction, and that just makes me proud that it works this way in a prototyping context.

Where The First Design Sprint Fell Short

Sebastian: Another finding, on my side as facilitator, is that we hit some technical glitches, especially with the Mural platform, and we didn’t have a backup plan prepared in advance. We had to pivot and adjust on the fly. We managed to finish the last part of the job without Mural, by taking notes offline and uploading everything into a coherent Mural board afterward. For the future, we should prepare a backup plan for any tool we’re relying on.

How Might We Increase Audience Engagement In Future Sprints

Sebastian: I framed the opportunities for improvement as how might we questions, to keep the tradition we followed throughout the sprint. The first is: how might we increase audience engagement. This is a major concern for me personally. Unless we make it more engaging for everyone, I feel like we’re under-delivering relative to what’s possible.

A few ideas for fixing that. Deliver some training beforehand so people can focus on the work being done rather than trying to learn the method and watch the team at the same time. Create an environment for simulating the workshop exercises, like workbooks or a sandbox in Mural, so the audience can at least simulate the work being done. Introduce a bit of gamification, for the audience and for the team, to make the whole experience more dynamic. And allocate more time for Q&A throughout the workshop rather than saving it all for the end, so people can ask questions while the work is happening.

How Might We Improve Prototype Quality In Future Sprints

Sebastian: The second how might we question is about improving prototype quality. I’m not saying we didn’t get a good enough prototype, but there’s room to improve. The first thing I’d focus on is narrowing down the concept and the storyboard, instead of trying to cover something very broad. It’s better to narrow the scope and deliver higher quality than to include everything and run out of time.

The second piece is investing more in visual design. We addressed it a little, but based on the feedback, people are really affected by the visual appearance of a learning product, which is normal across e-learning in general. Visual design plays an important role in helping learners absorb material and stay engaged with the journey.

Third, do a better job prioritizing tasks and deliverables before starting the actual prototyping work, which relates more to my project management background than to sprint facilitation. Fourth, do better progress tracking and time management for the prototyping work itself, since everyone works remotely on different tasks and deliverables on a short timeframe.

How Might We Help More Course Creators Apply The Design Sprint Method

Sebastian: The last how might we question is an overarching one: how do we help people in the community actually apply the design sprint, not just learn about it, since only five of us were directly involved this time.

A few ideas. More educational content, since people who learn how to do it are more likely to actually do it in their business. Helping people form their own design sprint teams, which is genuinely difficult, since most of our audience works alone or in very small teams of one to three people, while the preferred team size is closer to six. Coaching sessions for anyone who wants to move from learning to actually applying the method, since coaching, to me, means helping people find their own resources and commitment, not just lecturing at them.

I’m also thinking about introducing similar workshopping techniques to the community, like Lightning Decision Jam, marketing sprints, 10-for-10 action boards, and Challenge Hunters. These are all smaller, lower effort tools than a full design sprint, more like Lego pieces you can pick and choose from depending on the challenge in front of you. A design sprint is not a silver bullet for everything.

Other generic improvements: better storyboarding tools, like Sketch, since the storyboard is the blueprint for the prototype. Backup options for both Zoom and Mural, since both are cloud solutions that occasionally run into trouble. Extending the method with a follow-up plan, since the method itself doesn’t prescribe what to do once the sprint is over, that’s really the start of project management or product development. Identifying patterns across the challenges different course creators face, so we can build more customized solutions over time. Improving our Mural templates to be more appealing and functional. And making better use of instructional design and learning models when sketching solutions, since that’s the core of our profession as course creators, regardless of which workshopping method we use to validate ideas.

What Is Next For The Course Design Sprint Community

Sebastian: For next steps, future sessions should take all of these identified opportunities for improvement, prioritize them the same way with the impact effort scale, and bring an improved experience to the next edition of the course design sprint. I’d also like to establish and nurture a course design sprint community of practice. I have some experience building communities of practice in other areas, like project management and process improvement, and I’m ready to invest the time in building this one for course creators who want to get more involved and apply more of the design sprint method in their own businesses. If it’s alright with you, Chris, I’ll share a sign-up link in the chat, it’s just a waitlist to register interest, nothing being sold.

Chris Badgett: Sure, sounds great, thank you.

Why The Process Did The Heavy Lifting For The Panel

Chris Badgett: I guess that wraps up my presentation for today. I’m about four minutes over.

Sebastian: That’s a project manager for you.

Chris Badgett: Let’s go around the panel with some thoughts and experience. For me, I was really blown away by the process. I’m a creative person, I like making stuff up, but combining that with a real process, and not doing it alone, that whole “together alone” idea, was pretty cool. I also see myself in the audience comments about assumptions. We have a lot of assumptions as course creators about going to market and getting in front of people, and being open to feedback is powerful, even when it’s uncomfortable, because the product ends up so much better and so much easier to sell when you develop it with actual feedback.

I’d made software like LifterLMS for a long time, but I’d never actually watched user tests conducted like this before, and it was awesome. One of the most interesting things across the board was a kind of Facebook ad banner blindness. People just didn’t see the banner ad at all, I had to point them to it directly. That was a really interesting piece of feedback. Anyone else on the panel want to go next?

Where The Design Sprint Method Came From

Julie: I’ll go, I have some observations. Sebastian, I’m curious about the process itself. Is that a process you developed? It felt a bit like agile, but I’m not familiar with it and wanted to ask.

Sebastian: I can’t take credit for developing this method. It was designed by a gentleman named Jake Knapp, who worked as a product manager at Google, and it has been further refined by other practitioners since. I only tailored it a bit for course creation, since the method itself is meant for pretty much any kind of product, and I still need to do more tailoring to fit course creators specifically.

Julie: That was interesting, it was new to me. I’ve seen user journey maps and personas in agile processes before, but never this particular design sprint format.

Sebastian: It is indeed a kind of agile process, that’s why it’s called a sprint, they borrowed a lot of concepts from agile development. The most important one is time boxing, everything is time boxed. Otherwise design thinking, which is the foundation for design sprint, is a huge area with a lot of knowledge you could apply, but it takes a long time to make it work on its own. Design thinking is like math: math is infinite, but if you want to apply it you need a particular method or algorithm that works for your specific problem. That’s the main contribution of design sprint, which is itself rooted in design thinking.

Why Narrowing Down Your Concept Produces A Better Prototype

Julie: The other question I had was about narrowing down the concept, one of the improvements you mentioned. Can you expand on that a bit?

Sebastian: That’s definitely one of the barriers, not in learning the method, but in applying it. As course creators we tend to be ambitious, we want to create big courses covering everything we know about a topic, and sometimes we’re a bit over-ambitious about that. If you aim to deliver too much, you can end up delivering too little. Let’s not forget the purpose of the design sprint is just to test the idea, so we should think about the minimum set of features needed to test it, not the full set. There’s plenty of time afterward to develop a full course.

Julie: So what did you think was the key idea? There were a few things I felt we identified but didn’t really address in the final prototype, and I don’t think we actually tested some of that.

Sebastian: We didn’t test everything that came to mind. One idea I particularly liked was customizing the learning experience for the learner. I’m genuinely passionate about that, it’s what I try to do in all my own teaching. Learning isn’t an off-the-shelf product you buy like a bar of soap, it’s a human experience. Unfortunately it’s hard to test something as big as customization when you only have a few hours. With a bit more narrowing of the concept, we probably could have tested a small piece of it.

Julie: That’s the one that came to mind. We talked about it but really didn’t test it.

Sebastian: Right, because we were a bit over-ambitious, which is a good thing in itself, and the key learning here is aim high. That’s why we set a two year goal and stayed optimistic about long-term goals, while focusing more narrowly on the next concrete step.

Julie: That was good, I learned a lot going through the process. It would have been even better with a few more people, since you feed off other people’s ideas. I really like working as a team for that reason, each person brings different ideas. Thanks to all of you, it was a very good experience.

What The Test Users Noticed About Video Quality

Chris Badgett: Thank you, Kathy or Georgiana, want to weigh in before we turn it over to the audience?

Kathy: One thing I found really interesting from the test user interviews was their focus on the videos, specifically around building trust and production quality, and even getting distracted by different backgrounds. Chris, you have computers in the background that read as a professional studio, and one tester said she found that distracting and would rather see a blank wall. It hinted that maybe a green screen or a plain wall behind the presenter builds more trust. Their comments about the videos were genuinely interesting.

Georgiana: From my side, I’ll echo the idea that we should have concentrated on doing less, better. That’s something I do myself too often, I overcommit and don’t have the time to deliver everything well. It could have been better to scope down what we tried to fit into the prototype.

Chris Badgett: We’ve got about forty four more minutes, and I know the audience has questions. Sebastian, are you good to move into that?

Sebastian: Perfectly okay, I’m here for as long as you need. We can spend more than forty five minutes if it comes to it.

How To Use An Iteration Sprint To Serve A Second Customer Segment

Chris Badgett: One attendee’s program focuses on single moms starting an online business from home, but when she looks at who actually follows and engages with her content, there’s also a notable segment of married moms, a related but not identical audience. Her question was whether she should run a separate sprint for that second segment, focus only on the single moms, or think about it some other way.

Sebastian: I don’t have a magic recipe, but what comes to mind is running what’s called an iteration sprint for that second segment, a kind of zoom-in on a particular area of the initial prototype that lets you explore an additional set of features. An iteration sprint is less effort, about three days, since most of the groundwork was already done in the first sprint. Running a second sprint as an iteration might help her create a derivative product, or combine features into a single product that serves both segments. That’s not the only possible answer, but it’s a reasonable starting point.

Chris Badgett: That resonates with LifterLMS too. We focus a lot on the expert industry, people with specialties who want to teach and coach online, but we also have a lot of WordPress professionals and site builders who follow us. Different segments under one roof. I liked how you answered that.

Why Ideation Deserves As Much Focus As Implementation

Chris Badgett: One attendee also asked about developing more strategic thinking as a course creator, someone without formal training in instructional design or learning theory. How can they think more strategically about building curriculum?

Sebastian: Instructional design and learning models are both huge areas, I’d need days rather than hours to get properly into the details. But strategically, I see success in any education based business splitting into two main parts: ideation, the quality of your ideas, and implementation. If you handle those two in the right sequence, you have a much better chance of success. If you don’t invest enough in ideation, through design sprint or any other method, you end up wasting a lot of time in implementation instead.

My own background is mostly on implementation. I’ve done project management and consulting and training for project managers for about twenty years, and it’s been more recent that I got into the ideation side. Why? Because I’ve seen so many failed projects over those twenty years, failures worth billions of dollars in money spent or wasted, and I realized I was investing my effort in the wrong part of the cycle. Most projects fail because they never had a proper start, and a proper start means a validated idea. That’s why I became interested in the ideation process. If we all manage to focus on both sides of the business, ideation and implementation, that’s a genuinely strategic advantage.

Can You Run A Design Sprint By Yourself

Chris Badgett: Another attendee asked how to apply a design sprint as a single designer, for their everyday design process.

Sebastian: There are really two questions in there: working alone as a single designer, and applying it to everyday design work. As a single person you cannot fully apply the design sprint method, it’s designed to be a team method. All by yourself you can do pieces of it, like interviewing your customers and collecting problem statements as how might we questions, then placing them on a map that fits your business, but you need a team to run a full sprint, the same way you can’t run scrum by yourself in development. This is especially true for anything time boxed, since you need to concentrate significant effort into very short timeframes. I mentioned earlier that I’m focused on helping individual entrepreneurs find partners so they can run a proper sprint.

For the everyday design process, running a full design sprint daily isn’t realistic, but you can use other design-sprint-like methods for that. Lightning Decision Jam works well for picking and choosing problems to address as a designer, or for brainstorming. Ten-for-ten and Challenge Hunter are similar smaller workshopping methods you can use day to day. These require less effort than a full design sprint, so to conclude, you need a team for a full sprint, you can’t run one daily, but bits and pieces of the broader framework are genuinely useful in your day to day work.

Chris Badgett: One attendee also shared that watching Sebastian facilitate live taught her a lot about workshop facilitation on its own, and that just seeing the process happen was inspiring and gave her the confidence to immediately start implementing WordPress and LifterLMS tricks while watching the rest of us prototype.

Sebastian: Thank you for that. That was actually our intent with this event. We could have just run the sprint privately for one person in the community without opening it up for everyone else to learn from, but that didn’t feel like enough. We wanted to give as many people as possible a bit of incentive to invest more effort in learning the method themselves, because seeing someone else do it makes you more confident to try it with your own partners or colleagues. Otherwise most people just focus on building more content and more features without ever really knowing what the customer wants. A design sprint helps you learn what your audience actually wants, rather than what you assume they want.

Chris Badgett: Another attendee, whose teenage daughters work with her in the business, asked whether there’s an advantage or disadvantage to running a design sprint with strangers versus with people you already know well.

Sebastian: I don’t think there’s a clear advantage either way. It’s quite possible to run design sprints with people you know very well, coworkers, business associates, even family, as long as you’re used to working together. In fact, design sprint as a service is mostly offered inside corporations, where ninety percent of the team already works together at the same company. On the other hand, working with strangers gives you a good opportunity to bring fresh minds into the challenge you’re tackling. Either way works, as long as the team follows the process.

What The User Tests Revealed About Landing Pages And Focus

Chris Badgett: One attendee asked for any other feedback patterns from the user tests that might be of general use to people. I’ll go first with one: the Facebook banner blindness was interesting, and video quality was something people focused on a lot.

Sebastian: From the top of my mind, video quality was a major area of focus for most testers, people are sensitive to the visual appearance of what they see. It’s a real pattern, though I can’t name another specific theme off the top of my head right now.

Chris Badgett: I’ll add one. When people clicked through from the Facebook ad to the landing page, there was a call to action button right there, but only one person actually went up to the menu to look around at the course library that we’d spent so much time designing and building. It confirmed something I already suspected: landing pages really matter, and you can’t expect people to hunt around and find things on their own. You have to design the flow, since that’s the actual entry point into the user journey. Focus people on the learning journey rather than giving them too many places to lose focus. As an instructor or course creator, your job is to help people through the journey, starting properly without too much distraction, which connects back to visual design too. Good visual design should help a learner focus on learning, not on exploring aesthetics.

Sebastian: Yes, there are probably a lot of interesting themes we could still uncover in the analysis. I’d strongly encourage Julie to spend real time reading through all these feedback statements carefully, since that’s the actual work of feedback analysis and prioritization. You might find there are only three or four major themes worth focusing on, and for most of them you’ll only need a bit more effort, the quick fixes from the impact effort scale. For themes that need more effort but carry real impact, you’ll want to think more like a project manager and plan accordingly. Everything that can be fixed in a few days of work, group into common themes and knock out as quick fixes.

How Prototyping Connects To Building An MVP

Chris Badgett: I had another question related to what you said earlier, that a prototype is not an MVP. In the course creation and membership world, a lot of people, myself included, borrow “minimum viable product” language from software, minimum viable course, minimum viable membership. How would you connect the dots between prototype thinking and eventually deploying an MVP and a full product? Can you work with both concepts over time?

Sebastian: Totally. This is actually how I came across design sprints in the first place, since I’m also a supporter of the Lean Startup method and the MVP concept. I came across Lean Startup a few years ago through Eric Ries’s book, very useful, full of practical insight, but it’s a very scientific method, based on collecting hard data and feeding it back into the cycle of generating new ideas.

Design sprint, on the other hand, is a bit more subjective, a way to investigate people’s needs and wants that isn’t purely scientific. Everything we do in a design sprint involves human touch, perceptions, and impressions, and that’s fine, because learning itself isn’t one hundred percent scientific either. You need to find a balance between scientific methods like Lean Startup, based on hard data, and more subjective, human centered methods like design sprint.

The best way to integrate the two is to use design sprint as the path from your idea to your MVP. Before you invest in building an MVP, validate a prototype first. Once you have a validated prototype, you’re ready to move into the MVP phase. If you start investing effort into an MVP too early, the build phase keeps getting bigger and bigger, because you’re working from unvalidated assumptions. Design sprint lets you validate the idea very quickly, in just four days, before you move into full MVP development.

Examples Of Quick Fixes, Backlog Items, And Bigger Projects

Chris Badgett: Could you pull up your impact and effort slide again? An attendee asked for concrete examples, hypothetical or from Julie’s actual results, of what falls into backlog versus an easy win versus something that needs real project management time.

Sebastian: I’ll try, though I’m not sure I’ll find something perfectly relevant off the top of my head. As an example of a quick fix, if I were the customer of this prototype, I would improve the overall visual quality, videos, the general web design. That’s easy to fix, even with templates, you don’t need to be a great web designer or a superstar videographer, just some straightforward improvements. I’d treat that as a quick fix.

For something to add to the backlog, I can’t recall a specific item that stood out as a strong example right now, but the Facebook ad piece is a reasonable one. I’d treat it as a backlog item for now, since it’s not part of the core learning experience itself, it’s just how people discover your offering, which is marketing. I’m not saying marketing isn’t important, it’s a different part of your business, and you might even run a separate design sprint just for marketing later. For this prototype specifically, the ad wasn’t the heaviest piece in the game, so I’d say fix how people discover the offering eventually, but it isn’t the first thing to work on.

If you’re familiar with scrum or other agile methods, please don’t confuse this use of “backlog” with the agile “product backlog,” they’re different sets of terms. Here, backlog just means a list of things you might do eventually, that aren’t your first priority.

For a “plan a project” example, pricing didn’t come up as a huge theme in the feedback, which might just mean the pricing itself wasn’t a focus for this particular prototype, or the pricing we used wasn’t well designed. Either way, I’d package pricing and marketing together into a separate sprint down the line, which is actually common practice, plenty of companies run dedicated marketing or strategy sprints just for how they market a product.

Chris Badgett: One small comment on that: maybe the price itself wasn’t the important thing to test in this sprint, but the pricing model might be, since a different pricing model could change how you build the course itself.

Sebastian: That’s fair, but it comes back to narrowing the scope of the prototype. If you try to test too many things in a single prototype, the fidelity of that prototype drops, because your effort spreads across too many topics. Pick fewer things to address and you get a higher fidelity prototype for those specific things. A high fidelity prototype resembles the end product closely, a low fidelity prototype is more of a simulation. If you want high fidelity, narrow the scope. That said, the pricing model absolutely matters for planning future projects, since how you develop your course is closely tied to how you plan to sell it, which is why I’d fold that into a marketing or sales focused sprint rather than this one.

How To Select The Right Test Users For Your Course Prototype

Chris Badgett: One attendee’s question was about tester selection, how should someone think about choosing test users, and should they be as close as possible to your ideal customer?

Sebastian: We didn’t cover tester selection much during the teaching part of the event, but it’s a great question. You should try to recruit people who are genuinely part of your niche or segment, which means having personas for your customers defined before the sprint, so you know who you’re recruiting against.

For a real sprint, especially if you want it to be effective, try to recruit unbiased testers, people you don’t already know, since people who want to help you sometimes end up not helping you very much, because they’re trying to be nice rather than honest. Look for independent, objective, unbiased testers. You can publish an open call on your social channels, and it’s not uncommon to pay testers, since testing is real work that brings value to your business. Some companies do this with gift cards, or by giving free access to the product, in our case that would mean free access to a course. There’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for recruiting testers, but the process should connect directly to how you identify your target market and potential customers in the first place, since that’s exactly who you want testing the product.

Julie’s Biggest Takeaway And What Is Next For Her Course

Chris Badgett: Maybe one more question, then we’ll wrap up. Julie, what are you thinking going forward, what’s your biggest takeaway, and what might you do next?

Julie: I got a lot of value from it. I’d like to get Sebastian’s full worksheet so I can go back through everything, remember the process, and solidify the results, analyze the data, and come up with a next plan from there. I do intend to build out some courses. It was a good first step and I learned a lot. The testing part in particular was insightful, people didn’t notice things I assumed were obvious, which is interesting. I wasn’t expecting them to be quite so critical about the videos either. Overall it was a very good learning experience.

Chris Badgett: Thank you for sharing that. We’re coming up on time. Sebastian, go ahead and drop a link in the chat, and let people know where they can find out more about Experimentor Studios and the community you mentioned. Where are you headed with this mission? I really appreciate that you came to LifterLMS, we’ve been hanging out and networking online for almost five years now. How can people connect with you, and what are you feeling called to do with this area of expertise?

Sebastian’s Vision For A Course Design Sprint Community

Sebastian: I’ll share my goal, but first, my key takeaway from this whole experience: it reinforced something I already believed, that teaching starts with learning about your learners. If you want to be a good teacher, a good facilitator of a learning journey, you need to invest in learning about what they need and what they want, because those can be two different things. I’m genuinely happy I had the opportunity to learn about this community of education entrepreneurs.

My longer term goal is to bring as much value as I can from the corporate world into this community, since that’s where I’ve spent the last twenty years or so, experimenting with methods, processes, frameworks, and models. I’m an entrepreneur myself, I’ve run my own company for years after working for big companies and the public sector, so I can relate to the struggle and the problems you face as solopreneurs. I want to bring the kind of expertise that’s normally reserved for big corporations into this community, particularly around design sprint for course creators. I want to build this together, not do it alone and not do it just for you, but with you, which means I need your feedback to design the community, the content, and the events properly. Feel free to connect with me and ask questions about instructional design, e-learning technology, design sprints, or project management as it applies to e-learning.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, our goals are totally aligned. My mission is to democratize learning in a digital classroom, and I love that framing. There are people paying thirty thousand dollars for an LMS system that isn’t as powerful as LifterLMS, and the fact that you can prototype essentially for free on the WordPress site you already have really aligns with that mission. I want to thank Julie for her courage to go through this with us on stage in front of everyone, that takes real courage. Sebastian, Georgiana, it’s great working with you, and Kathy, as always over the past six years, I couldn’t do this without you.

I’ll wrap up the webinar unless you have any final words.

Sebastian: Just that I want to thank everyone for being part of this, the whole team and the audience who stuck with us for such a long time. This wasn’t a usual webinar experience, and I really appreciate everyone’s time investment. I look forward to continuing this one way or another, it was a great opportunity to learn what you all need, and we should prepare even better for the next edition of the course design sprint.

Chris Badgett: That sounds awesome. Thank you everybody for coming, and thank you to the amazing panel. It’s been a great ride. Hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Take care.