What To Do Post Data Collection

Let’s say you’re thinking of starting a hover-craft share company. You’ve established your town’s hover-craft sharing potential but you’re less sure where the revenue model lies. Perhaps, instead, you’re already running a hover-craft share business that’s failed to generate revenue in a healthy matter and decide it’s time to investigate why. In either scenario, you’re next step is doing some research. You can read about research techniques in other articles. This article is focused on what happens after the research is done.

So now you’ve just come back from a huge data collection spree. You’ve collected everything there is to know about hover-crafts and conducted interviews with both potential riders and local public transportation experts. It might be tempting to immediately begin coming up with solutions, but there’s a better approach. One that keeps you from missing different perspectives and correlations. This is known as the Ideation Phase.

Ideation Phase

1. Learnings | In the first step, start scribbling your different findings out on post-its and stick them on a wall. Keep going until you think your post-its break-out all your findings to represent them thoroughly. * The one main road in town is always jammed
2. Themes | Once you think your post-its speak to all your data, it’s time to organize them. Stand back from your wall to identify patterns that should’ve began to form. Break your post-its into groups that make sense to you and group those post-its. * Existing Local Transportation Solutions
3. Insights | It’s time to put on paper (post-its) some of your assumptions. * Locals need a new option to commute into work
4. How Might We’s | Now pose some questions against your Insights. Be sure to reference the rest of your stickies to keep an eye on the bigger picture. * HOW MIGHT WE convince locales to pay for hover-crafts instead of riding their lame hipster bikes for free?
5. Ideas | It’s time to get creative. Be wild and bold with solutions. Take into account your “how might we’s” with the problems and patterns you’ve already identified. It’s important to not set boundaries or think too realistically yet. Start big and wait for inspiration to follow shortly behind. * Hire Aliens to sport hover-crafts around town to convince locales to rent them from our hover-craft sharing program.

The More the Merrier

Thinking through ideas in a silo can be useful for focusing but not great for ideating. Ideation is all about stretching your mind into realms and concepts you wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise. Hearing another’s perspective is the perfect exercise to reach new revelations. Never be dismissive toward anyone’s idea. Pretend it’s yours. Play with everyone’s concepts together. If you have a thought, be sure to share it. Collective minds crank out the best ideas.

As crucial as data collection is, what you do with it is where the real magic lies. Ideation can be the first step in a good digestion of any research plan. I should say that market research was just used as an example here. An Ideation Phase can be applied to really any research effort. Think about how it might apply to persona development or survey analysis. It’s also widely recognized as a step in all the various design sprint methodologies out there including Google Ventures and Stanford’s Design Sprint. I pulled my information here from Ideo’s Design Kit which you can download for free.

I’m sure this concept has other names or variations, but the point is just to have everyone on your team collectively understand and agree on all the findings. It’s a tough goal to accomplish but I’ve always managed to get there with the Ideation Phase. I hope it does the same for you and your team.

In conclusion, if you ever see an alien sporting a hover-craft, we hope you’ll consider renting one the next time you need to get around town. Happy analyzing!

Originally published at www.orangedrum.com on March 6, 2015.