Timeboxing: The Secret Ingredient to Design
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We chat to the Local Peoples team about how time constraints can enhance the innovation process.
What is timeboxing?
Timeboxing is something very particular to design sprints. You’re given a very strict time within which you have to answer a question or resolve a debate. Essentially, timeboxing involves making an agreement about what comes next in a very limited timeframe.
In design sprints this is enforced rigorously using a Time Timer, a device that displays how much time is left, allowing you to hurry the discussion along. This creates a sense of urgency and encourages action rather than conversation so that decisions get made. You have two days in a sprint to work out what the problem is and how to solve it.
Timeboxing each exercise in a design sprint allows you to step through that process and make sure you’re accomplishing each task, moving through to resolving the problem.
Why is it useful to hurry people along instead of deep diving into a particular problem?
I think design sprints are a useful tool to create forward momentum. In most organisations, momentum is difficult due to a culture of deferring decisions, or because a certain amount of risk-averse mentality is built into the organisation.
Design sprints presuppose that people are coming to the process with a certain amount of information that just needs to be crystalised in order to take action. So in terms of creating deep insights, there are other tools in the human-centered design toolkit that are better for really unearthing those. What sprints are good for is taking the knowledge and insights that already exist and surfacing that, which ultimately leads to action.
The insights you do gain through the design sprint process often come about because you have people in the room together who may not normally talk or work together. So if you’re able to assemble a cross functional team – marketing, sales, product development, engineering, communications – you can get them collaborating together on something new and insightful.
One thing I used to do is set the timer to a duck sound on the iPhone so at least when people are getting interrupted, its by something that’s funny and that tends to break the ice.
How rigorous is timeboxing in design sprints?
It’s pretty brutal. Typically exercises run between five minutes with a long exercise being about 20 minutes. There are two kinds of main exercises within design sprints and they are both rigorously timeboxed.
- Conversation and collaborative idea generation: this exercise involves a lot of Post-It notes and the aim is extracting as much information as you can in a limited amount of time. These exercises are quite short. Usually, the most important things tend to come out early so you don’t need them to go much longer. Timing the activity prevents you from going down wormholes of detail.
- Together alone: in this exercise, people are given 15-20 minutes to really think about the problem in their own way. They take notes, write down ideas, develop their own thinking, then present their ideas to the group.
There are always lots of grumbles when the timer rings, but I think people tend to get into the swing of it pretty quickly so they push out the best ideas first. That rigour means that people start to self-censor around things that are extraneous to the topic at hand. Everyone becomes more focused as a result.
Why does timeboxing work in a sprint?
It focuses people’s attention to what they should be accomplishing. It might feel like a slightly unnatural way of doing things, but the timeboxing stage is when you get the most done.
Three things that go alongside timeboxing in design sprints:
- No distractions rule: no-one is allowed digital devices. You make every five minutes count and everyone in the room is paying attention.
- Readily available snacks: providing to eat stops people from getting hangry and keeps them focused.
- Breaks: it’s important to make sure people know when a break is coming up or they can get restless and distracted.
How do you make people feel comfortable with being timeboxed?
It helps to have the timer visible so the group can see how much time is going down and it’s less of a surprise. One thing I used to do is set the timer to a duck sound on the iPhone so at least when people are getting interrupted, its by something that’s funny and that tends to break the ice. It can be confronting at first but when we introduce Design Sprints we always flag that upfront and talk about that it will be slightly uncomfortable and it’s going to go extremely fast.
