Tackling UX challenges as a team
A process for rapid group ideation
— with Tori Holmes and Alexandre Benitah
UX work is rarely straightforward. To cope with this complexity, at Booking.com we leverage our greatest asset: the power of our team. Pairing a diverse team with the right processes can help solve big challenges or identify new opportunities.
Do you need to generate ideas quickly to tackle product, UX, or business challenges with your team?
In this article, we’ll share a process our UX community uses to generate hundreds of ideas for new and existing features and flows across a wide range of topics. You’ll learn how to run an ideation session that connects UX ideas to business objectives, factors in competitive insights, and involves all crafts at the start.
As a bonus, we’ve also compiled a Miro template you can use (password: bookingcom) in your sessions! Feel welcome to make a copy of it.
But before we get to the details, here are some things to consider as you begin planning your session.
Things to consider
First, plan a dedicated session for each topic you want to ideate on. This way, you have enough time to onboard people to the topic and go through the ideation process.
Second, try to be forward-thinking yet pragmatic. Our recommended way of achieving this starts with collecting data points on the following three pillars: user needs and pain points, business objectives, and industry and competitive sights. (more on these below).
And, finally, it’s good to leverage diversity by inviting as many different roles as possible from UX (designers, writers, researchers) and, if possible, product, marketing, and engineering.
Before the session
Start by collecting data points for the following three pillars.
- User pain points and needs
Look into past research and capture any user needs relevant to the topic. - Business goals and needs
Talk to product managers and business leaders to get their perspectives on the main product and business goals. - Competitive landscape
Explore competitors’ product features or strategies by testing their products and checking PR/announcements and social media.
Whether using virtual stickies in Miro or physical post-it notes, use one note per data point and choose a unique colour for each pillar. This will make sorting and grouping them later much easier.
Additionally, you can include text descriptions, screenshots and links that could help frame the topic in the participants’ minds. Here are some examples:
- Screenshots of and links to your current product
- Screenshots of and links to competing products
- Other materials like press releases or marketing campaigns of competitors
This additional material is helpful for participants who need to become more familiar with your topic.
After you’ve finished collecting the data points, you can send session invitations to those closest to the topic. While UXers are at the heart of the process, extend an invitation to any relevant product, marketing, and engineering colleagues who can bring unique insights and perspectives.
During the session
1. Introduce the topic (10 mins)
Start the session with a walkthrough of the topic, covering:
- Why this topic is important
- How did things come to be the way they are
- An explanation of the three categories
- A walkthrough of the additional material collected
2. Go through the collected data points (10’)
Next, read the notes aloud one-by-one, giving participants the opportunity to add any data points they think are missing.
3. Cluster data points into themes (10’)
In line with standard affinity mapping exercises, choose one or more of the notes and propose a name for the theme. This name should be no longer than a sentence and the participants should agree on it. The name of the theme can be refined further once more notes are added, but it’s important to agree on the initial naming because it will help participants pick relevant data points.
Encourage the participants to start forming themes independently, by grouping data points and adding names. This is designed to be a collaborative exercise, where the group can discuss the proposed themes. For instance, have participants explain their reasoning behind the proposed theme names and whether a data point belongs in one theme or another.
Like with most affinity mapping exercises, the goal is to have the smallest meaningful number of themes.
Tip: Theme names shouldn’t be so generic that half of the data points could fit under it, but they also shouldn’t be so specific that it only applies to one or two points. If you have too many themes, it’s harder to determine which directions to explore further.
At the end of the exercise, the themes that contain all three colours would be higher priority topics for the brainstorming, as they are at the intersection of all three pillars.
4. Silent brainstorm (15–30’)
In “remote” parts of the whiteboard, every participant starts putting their ideas for moving forward with the topic. This can include:
- Product features
- Connecting dots between existing teams’ work
- Wildly forward-thinking proposals
- Down-to-earth, low-hanging fruit
You want to receive as much contribution as possible from everybody at this stage.
Tip: It can be helpful to have a few empty notes ready (that are coloured differently than those of the three pillars above) for participants to duplicate and add their ideas.
5. Share ideas (20–30’)
After the silent brainstorm, all participants take turns in sharing their ideas. While a participant is sharing their idea, it’s perfectly fine for the other participants to be inspired to refine or add new ideas. The goal of this exercise is to inspire each other, resulting in greater collective output.
A couple of important things to remember:
- Participants don’t need to contribute ideas for all themes — depending on their expertise they may only contribute ideas for select themes.
- Some ideas can correspond to more than one theme. If this happens, the idea can be duplicated and added to multiple themes.
- Ideas are meant to be high-level, they’ll be refined at a later stage.
At this stage we start to see the magic of leveraging our “collective brain”, with different roles bringing different perspectives. Some directions for exploration will start forming too, as we start to see similar ideas being shared by different participants.
After the session
Following this session, start clustering the participants’ ideas with the themes identified during the brainstorm. Each theme should include:
- User needs and pain points
- Product / business goals
- Competitive insights
- Ideas for moving forward, which depending on their nature might also be possible to cluster together by relevance
During this process of clustering you’ll start to identify recurring ideas within each theme which will help you decide how to move forward.
Once finalised, these ideas can be transferred over to a backlog for prioritisation, using one of these frameworks:
- Dot voting by team members of the product team working on the topic’s domain
- NN’s proposed prioritisation by impact versus effort
At the end of this process you will have a holistic overview of your topic, built on a foundation of user needs and pain points, business objectives, and competitive insights. A great use for this information is the creation of:
- UX visions
- UX strategies
- Any other large-scale project that helps you tackle big UX problems.
Using this method, the Booking UX community has been able to generate hundreds of ideas and solve challenges across a wide range of products and topics. We hope you find this helpful in your future UX ideations!
Special thanks to Chris Cameron, Graham Cookson, Ian Swinton, Varshini Murali, and Fedora Devena for their help with this article.
