We ran a design sprint over five consecutive days in February 2025. We’ll share the outcomes from the sprint in another blog. Here we’ll be exploring running the sprint itself, what went well and what we’d do differently next time.
What prompted this work
During a research project, a young person who seemed interested in taking part, decided to leave after being presented with a consent form. This is their right, and we don’t know the specifics of why they didn’t want to take part, but our assumption is that the consent process may cause issues for people with anxiety around demands.
It’s important to us that we hear from as many voices as possible, so we can design services that meet the diverse needs of our residents. Excluding people who experience demand avoidance could mean missing out on this group’s perspective. Informed consent is important, but it can involve sharing a lot of information and questions with participants.
We wanted to explore if there is anything we could do differently to make the consent process more inclusive.
Why we chose a design sprint
A design sprint is more conventionally used to solve a design problem or create a new feature for a piece of software or an app. In this instance, we thought it could be a helpful way to explore this problem and generate some new thinking around consent processes.
Who took part in the sprint
We assembled a small team around the problem. We were all interested in learning more about demand avoidance and consent forms, and what we could do to lessen the anxiety that may be triggered by them.
We shared some information about what we were planning to do through our networks and were surprised to find lots of people were interested in joining us.
It was heartening to have so many people show an interest in this work. We had participants from a wide range of places like:
- other local councils
- the Home Office
- the Department for Education
- the private sector
- charities
- freelance design professionals
We had lived experience of autism and neurodivergence in general in the room. We didn’t ask anyone to declare anything about themselves, but people chose to share, which was invaluable.
We had people join who work directly with autistic young people, and some parents. We united around a shared interest in the goal to improve the consent process for users.
What went well
We had a pre-sprint meet up to discuss how to make the sprint as inclusive as possible and agree a code of conduct. We agreed on things like:
- allowing for different communication styles (like typing in the chat as well as speaking)
- no expectation for cameras to be on
- making sure the environment was as safe and friendly as possible
- regular breaks every 40 minutes, with no exceptions
- not forcing people into breakout rooms
We used optional breakout rooms that people could dip in and out to as they wanted, and this proved popular.
What was challenging
Where to begin…? The whole sprint was a challenge, for all of us. Really diving in-depth into a problem over one week is a fantastic way to be focused and get results. On the flip side, it’s hard to carve that time out of a diary without impacting other work.
The complexity of the subject
We had so much to cover. A typical design sprint involves spending the Monday exploring the problem, and this problem is vast. It involved the group sharing knowledge about neurodiversity and demand avoidance, as well as consent processes and ethics. It feels like we only had time to scratch the surface, but we used what we learned productively.
Flexibility vs focus
The content of the sessions often felt a little messy; we wanted to allow for flexibility and to be able to pivot to explore new areas or change tasks if something felt like it would be more successful. This flexibility led to a lack of clarity at times.
Running low on energy
It was hard work. Despite taking regular breaks, working intensely like this is draining. Finishing the sessions absolutely spent felt like we were exploiting the energy that people were turning up with. So, after Tuesday’s session, we limited the sessions to three hours instead of four.
Recruiting research participants
The nature of demand avoidance and extreme anxiety meant that it was challenging to get as much lived experience in the room as we would have liked – but this made the participation that we did get even more valuable.
Requiring consent to test consent…
Considering the needs of people with demand avoidance meant preparing for the research element of the sprint in a different way to a conventional design sprint. We didn’t want to subject participants to online interviews with people they’d never met, and so we designed an entirely remote research activity that could be done in the participants’ own time.
And of course, ‘testing’ a new consent process involved, in itself, obtaining consent. We then had to think about a research activity that could test our ideas about improving ways to gain informed consent, and this was tricky.
We needed more space for research prep
Our design sprinters told us that they would have liked more time to have been available to support with the research activity. As it was, our Thursday session was spent dissecting and reconstructing what a consent process might look like, and then following that, the research activity was devised and set up. Several things didn’t quite go to plan here, and it would have been better to have had more time to work together on this with the team of sprinters.
We were tightly limited by time on this, as is the nature of a design sprint. We only scratched the surface, and we were caught up in a whirlwind of exploration and new ideas. But we made significant headway and got some great results, so the challenges were all worthwhile.
What we would do differently if we did it all again
Room for flexibility is important in this type of sprint, but it may have been helpful to set up some ‘guard rails’ in advance on what we would cover and deliver by the end of the sprint. This could also have been helpful session-by-session. We had an idea of what needed to be done each day but this is a huge topic and one that would expand into all the time we could dedicate it.
It’s also worth noting that a design sprint is best facilitated by more than one person. Having two or three minds and pairs of hands to organise the sessions and accommodate the changes of direction would help things to run more smoothly.
What we will do next
We’ve made some headway into this, and we’ve achieved a great set of principles to work from. However, it was clear that we’re far from being able to draft any new guidance on consent processes. The great thing is that the group who attended are keen to keep the work going!
We plan on implementing some of the principles in our research going forward and sharing what we’ve done so far as widely as possible. We intend to meet again regularly to keep this work progressing and make improvements where we can.
We’ve also made valuable connections between our organisations and hope to keep building on this for more collaborative problem solving in the future.
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