It’s the moment where the discovery phase has finally wrapped up, insights about needs and pain points have been collected and an effective problem framing has been defined. The team has finally gathered up in a room, ready to brainstorm and bring their best ideas to the table.
Brainstorming is fun because it’s intuitive — it’s the go-to strategy for ideation.
And because it’s intuitive — if you don’t start with challenging prompts in mind, your team can get stuck with stale ideas that aren’t going to hit the target problem and metrics nor revolutionise the industry any time soon.
Co-creation workshops set one goal for the team — come up with a few solid ideas that answer “find a way to solve X” or “find a way to achieve Y”. Most of the time, however, we tend to skip the “how do we trigger solid ideas” memo. Everyone is left to their own devices to re-surface experience and references in order to produce those A-game ideas we are looking for.
Going back to the last time you thought of an idea, can you actively remember the questions you were asking yourself to trigger the process? Idea generation is intuitive, so intuitive that you might not even be able to pinpoint the reasons and triggers at first. Your brain works up some internal, silent prompts for you. An idea clicks. The risk is that if you are not consciously focusing on triggers and cannot pinpoint the whys, how can you ensure your idea is the fitting solution?
If you are familiar with Design Sprints, you probably remember Lightning Demos.
... After a full day of understanding the problem and choosing a target for the sprint, a lightning demo session is run for the team to look at great solutions from a range of companies and capture ideas.
This is one of the most common external triggers for idea generation. And it’s a handy method, since visualising other peoples’ approaches to similar problems can help us associate and synthesise ideas. The caveat with it is that you run a high risk of copying & stitching what you’ve already seen. Sure —
Users tend to prefer things they’re already familiar with. And the more they experience something, the more likely they are to like it.
Still, there is a difference between understanding the reasoning for using common patterns and blindly applying the coolest competitor ideas.
If you ‘ve participated in a co-creation workshop, you already know that quantity is key here, not quality. Interesting ideas are found among a multitude of ideas — and you want to get your really obvious ones out of the way, early on. What frequently happens is that after the first ideation round, people focus on building upon one of their initial ideas.
To their minds they most probably have found “the answer”.
The problem with finding “the answer” is that it can be difficult to get past it. But the earlier you stop, the less likely it is to spawn brilliant ideas.
To evoke great ideas, you must set an ideation frame and select the right prompts for ideation. Here is the framework I use to prepare for workshops:
❏ Start with the problems and insights you’ve identified. After the team has run the discovery phase, gather the problems you have uncovered.
❏ Prioritise problems into core-shaping and complimentary. If you have several findings, agree with the team on the top critical problems that need to be addressed. To focus on core-shaping problems, try to gauge how solving a problem will affect or shape your success metrics. Try to keep them up to 3–4 max.
Note: Address complimentary problems in a separate activity, so that the ideations don’t run shallow, as participants try to find solutions for multiple problems.
❏ Define a base user flow. For those core-shaping problems, note down the related as-is-scenario user flow, showing how users interact with your product. Remember to keep it simple: five to fifteen steps. If you are starting from scratch, ideate for a few minutes and map a simple user flow. You don’t have to worry about quality at this point. Our goal is to create a base that we will challenge during the workshop.
Note: Setting a journey as an ideation base helps the team shift focus from thinking about features to thinking about how they can optimise the experience.
❏ Create How Might We prompts. Now that you have a flow in place, you are going to reframe problems into opportunities since this allows for better ideation. Construct How Might We questions that frame each core-shaping problem you selected earlier. We are going to keep the sentences after the How Might We as our product opportunities.
❏ Set a simple ideation trigger. This is going to be the first trigger for your workshop. Find something simple that allows the first, really obvious ideas to come out, so that there is room for more interesting ideas with the next ideation triggers.
Example: Ask participants to go through the ideation base you crafted earlier and think about the following prompt “Design a better way to [product opportunity] ”. This helps put the focus on ideating for a product opportunity and not drafting pet solutions.
❏ Keep it going. An easy way to help participants stretch their thinking for later ideation rounds of the workshop, is to change the context or perspective of their current references. See below some methods you can use to set your ideation triggers.
Given you’ve already uncovered insights about your users, show participants some of your findings highlights and ask them to focus on a specific user.
Now ask them to come up with ideas for the following prompt “Design a better way for [user name] to [product opportunity] ”.
Note: You may need to change how you frame the product opportunity so that it is relevant the user.
If you are brainstorming on lab created scenarios, it’s possible that later down the road you are going to be hit by some hidden detail from real life. Changing the context of the situation can help expand the visibility lens. Ask participants to come up with ideas with prompts like “Design a better way to [product opportunity] when [unexpected situation constraint] ”.
Just before an ideation round, ask participants to read through a number of known cognitive biases and principles. This kind of priming works by activating relevant knowledge snippets in the participants short-term memory. It is also a great way to spark interest to younger designers to dig deeper into behaviour mechanics. Use with caution however, as it can also activate a false sense of expertise.
Note: Keep in mind that you will need to vet a list of insights that are relevant to the product opportunities at hand. Growth.design has a brilliant list to source from.
To solve problems in new and competitive ways, you need non-obvious ideas. How do you come up with non-obvious ideas? Be comfortable with getting absurd. Sure, using prompts like “Design a better way to [product opportunity] in the year 2049”, won’t directly provide useful ideas, but it can help spawn a brilliant idea from them.
This post is actually a first iteration — ok, I mean first readable — so in case you want to contribute with your feedback on the ideas send it my way on Linkedin.