Ideating

The ideation stage typically involves two stages:

• flaring out and generating lots of diverse ideas that get you thinking outside the box
• focussing in and narrowing down the ideas the ones that you'd like to incorporate into your design solution

How Might We  questions are great way to generate the seeds of ideas that you can use to launch your brainstorming.

Here's an overview and tips on how to use How Might We questions from the d.School Bootcamp Bootleg:

4A - Design Thinking - Ideating Methods - How Might We.pdf

After you've lined up your How Might We questions (to focus your brainstorming energy), you're ready to dive in.

Brainstorming is a great way to come up with lots of ideas by leveraging and building upon the creativity of all your design team members and collaborators.

It's typically helpful to start with each of the How Might We questions, and use them as a seed and a framework to guide your brainstorming.   Keeping the process open-ended and inviting creativity, while staying focussed and productive is an art that you'll develop through lots of practice.

While brainstorming:

• Go for quantity -- we want lots of ideas!
• Use headlines rather than diving into the details -- keep it moving lightly
• Encourage wild ideas and creative approaches
• Defer judgement -- get the ideas out on the table, but don't debate, dissect, or disparage them.
• Stay on topic -- if you're drifting off-topic, that might be a sign that you have another How Might We question to consider

When we're together the "All-In" every person write their ideas on post-it notes and stick them to the board is a great way to capture lots of ideas.

With everyone working remotely, this is harder to do.  You might try:

• Having one person act as a scribe, capturing the ideas on a document as they share their screen.
• Having everyone on the team open a shared document, for example a Google Slides document, that everyone can add to freely -- similar to sticking post-it notes to the wall.

Here's an overview and tips on how to Brainstorm effectively from the d.School Bootcamp Bootleg:

4B - Design Thinking - Ideating Methods - Brainstorming.pdf

Change isn't easy!

While we can often list a bunch of very rational reasons for why someone should want to change, they often resist.  When users have choice, we need to assess and help them move through the steps of accepting and acting on the change.

Journey Maps are a very useful framework for:

• capturing the traits of a specific user profile and their needs
• list the steps in the user's journey
• itemizing their needs at each step in the journey
• capturing your assessment of their emotional journey -- how are they feeling? -- at every step of the way
• identifying opportunities to improve the journey
• ideating about ways to deliver on those opportunities

Here are some examples of Journey Maps for:

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Switching Mobile Phone Plans

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Shopping for a New Car

After you've flared out and generated lots of creative ideas during your brainstorming, you'll need to focus in again -- harvesting the most promising ideas that you'd like to carry forward and incorporate into your proposed design solution.

There's no single, right way to select the ideas, but you might try:

• voting -- all team members mark the three or four ideas that they are most attracted to, interested in developing.
• grouping and sorting the ideas into categories -- for example:
• the rational choice
• the most likely to delight
• the long shot

Here's an overview and tips on how to Select ideas effectively from the d.School Bootcamp Bootleg:

4C - Design Thinking - Ideating Methods - Selection.pdf

As you're developing your design idea, it's very tempting to keep embellishing and adding features to the core concept.

We've all done it... You find yourself thinking, "well, as long as I'm doing X, wouldn't it be cool if I also did Y, and how about Z too!"  This is known as "feature creep", and it's a real danger in most design projects.

As you develop your creative design solution, it's critical to stay focussed on the core features of your design that address the needs you identified in your point of view.  You'll be prototyping these features and testing their effectiveness, and you can't let yourself get distracted by adding bells and whistles that dilute your attention.

You can consider adding in some of those extra features -- at a later time -- but only after you've fully designed and testing your core features.

To help you stay focused, it's useful to outline the features of your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) -- the essential features that you proposed design must provide.   Some define it as "the smallest thing that you can build that delivers customer value".

Try to keep the list very brief and concise.  This isn't a full product spec -- it's a bullet list of essential items to help remind you of what's absolutely essential for your product to provide.

Here are a few blog posts that describe how thinking about the Minimum Viable Product can help lead to to better designs:

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Design - Balancing Risk to Gain Reward

The idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) has been around for some time. The term itself was coined by Frank Robinson but was made popular by two influential names in product design - Steve Blank, a serial-entrepreneur and academic, and Eric Ries, the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement.

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