Activate Shopping Mode
One thing you can do in a design sprint, that’s very cumbersome to do otherwise, is “ship” multiple fundamentally different product or marketing concepts to your customers.
Not an a/b test, but completely different approaches to positioning, differentiation, product architecture, workflow, etc.
This works REALLY WELL because it snaps people’s brains into “Shopping Mode.” I don’t know why, but Shopping Mode is powerful—we all “shop” all the time, and we’re much better at comparing options than we are at reacting yes/no to single option.
A few teams in Character Labs are doing this right now. It’s shockingly easy to do, especially if you are building with AI.
Here’s how it works, high level:
Use sketching or other solo work to generate different concepts. DON’T do this as a group discussion, or your multiple concepts will converge to one blah compromise.
Pick out the ones you want to test by identifying the specific hypothesis for why you think it’ll work. E.g. “if we make the homepage super simple and get people into using the product ASAP, they will be more likely to understand it, like it, and convert”.
Use whatever prototyping tools you like best to create these as separate apps. Here’s a trick: If you are fluent in multiple tools, use a different tool for each concept—this will keep them from looking like flavors of the same thing.
THIS IS KEY: Give each approach a different name and visual style. In other to activate Shopping Mode for your customers, they have to believe they are looking at multiple different products. If you show them versions A, B, and C of the same product, they will slip into Feedback Mode and try to give you advice. This is 90% less useful than their raw reactions as they shop.
Interview your customers, and during the interview, ask them to look at a couple of sites/apps/products/whatever with you. Don’t tell them these are different flavors of the same thing. If you did it right, they won’t notice—they’ll think they are just “shopping” for a solution.
(You can’t do this as an a/b test, because: a. it’s too slow to fix all the bugs and ship production-ready code, and b. you want to be there when your customer is shopping)
Congratulations, you just learned more in 5 days than most founders do in 5 months :)