Ideation (in team)
Some time ago, I had workshops with a team of aspiring UX Designers. I asked them to generate solutions to my very — pet-project — design statement. I am startled, how prolific, creative and different from my solutions were these three teams. It took less than two hours, and they pushed the project light-years ahead. I thought that pet-projects, since a voluntary mind exercise, can be run solitarily, now I do generate solutions in “makeshift” teams.
Ideation is the creative part of User Experience design. It is when the team has already acquired the thorough understanding of the domain; has identified pain-points and defined personas, goals, and scenarios. It is the third phase of the Design Thinking process.
In the following piece, I will draw a team ideation method, that takes fully from Design Charette, Mind Writing and Crazy Eights. There are also numerous concepts shared with decision-making and judgements because taking up a sound design decision and making a fair judgement requires equal decision hygiene.
Ideation is a team activity, although not always a designer work in a team, one should constantly try to make the process most objective and use “outside-view” as much as possible; questioning outcomes, weighing options, trying to engage external collaborators or reviewers and surely… sleep on it, and think again.
If done with proper diligence, the Ideation Phase, ends with the best solution to a given problem. The next step is to prototype it.
More about Design Thinking process and Ideation Phase:
UX Designer’s Lifecycle
How the UX Designer role aligns with the software delivery process.
medium.com
Ideation consists of:
- Casual (intuitive) thinking (Divergent Phase);
- Generating creative solutions (Emergent Phase);
- Synthesis and critical (logical) thinking (Convergent Phase).
Some say you can come up with a solution just like in fairy-tales, by eureka moment. But it is hardly like this. Although plausible, there is a gestation omitted. In fact, the Ideation Phase is to fine-tune ideas and set aside first guts guesses.
- It is to de-bias your primary thoughts.
- It is to keep the focus on user’s pain-points.
- It is to generate ‘alternative’ and second-choice solutions.
- It is also to cut on objective ignorance (denying that we don’t know enough).
1. Causal thinking (Divergent)
Causal thinking comes naturally to our minds. It is intuitive. It creates plausible stories, in which specific events, people, and objects affect one another. Causal thinking is related with storytelling and emotions. It requires not more than an actor (persona), the goal, and pain-points. There is a strong analogy to craft of story, the 3-act structure(setup, problem, solution). Causal thinking is about roughly inventing the plot. Simple success stories, like:
A knight needs to kill a dragon to marry the princess. Many others lost in the open sword fight, he sneaks on the dragon and hoaxes him into eating poisoned food.
The designer has to inspire others, stoke theirs fires, to make them willingly solve the pain-point (mischievous dragon)of the story’s protagonist. It’s the opening, it starts with stage setup and outcomes are multiple simple plots where constraints and restrictions aren’t considered, and where persona accomplishes her goals in a simple process. The story told anew. The designer is arousing emotions and is taking care that team members generate simple, impartial solutions.
2. Generating creative solutions (Emergent)
Emergent phase is when the team analyse deeper their ideas, try to choose the best ones and think about their feasibility. First, the designer navigates the team through multiple, low-level-details solutions. The team may be noisy (divergent) with their ideas, and the goal is to make an aggregate of promising solutions and then examine them if they are realistic, doable and roughly cost-effective. Then the solution is detailed, divided into steps and experimented on, to make sure none of key factors are missing. Experiment bases on sketches and visuals, and doesn’t delve into technicalities.
At this point, together with the team, best divided into sub-groups, the designer should end up with sketched and well thought-through ideas of solving users’ pain-points.
3. Synthesis and critical (logical) thinking (Convergent)
Now, when you have narrowed down to a few solutions, and since they are well devised, it’s the time to shift the team focus into possible threats, constraints, costs, complexity, and capacity to deliver solutions. You should converge to one, perfected idea of solution that you want to prototype.
The designer profits most, when the team has been divided into smaller groups — the smallest is 2 people. Doing so, you arrive to a couple of solutions to ponder over. If there is no such comfort, and your team isn’t numerous, you can always merge your own ideas with your team ideas in the Convergent phase.
Your outcome is:
- unbiased, unlimited, creative ideas;
- a prototype-ready solution;
- shared ownership of the solution;
- team curious and motivated to prototype and test;
- bunch of alternatives, if prototype testing proves unpromising.
Groupthinking
The groupthinking is when the team speaks out one member’s solution. When engaging a team in the activity, the designer is more of a social scientist, psychologist, and facilitator. Although the team work diminishes the bias and generates multiple solutions, it requires additional preventive measures, for it not to degenerate and bias results.
“Social influences are a problem because they reduce ‘group diversity without diminishing collective error’. (…)A little social influence can produce a kind of herding that undermines the wisdom of the crowd. One speaker can start a process in which several people are led to participate in a cascade. If early speakers seem to like something, others might assent. More, the natural propensity of human is to neglect that most of the people in the crowd are in a cascade too”. “(…) Additionally, if some speakers cherish higher esteem or professional standing, the Informational Cascade can be enforced by the Social Pressure Cascade.” (Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein). Groups amplify noise and the synthesis is more time-consuming.
To avoid grouphinking the designer has to make sure, all the solutions come independently, that they are talked over, voted on and aggregated.
How it is done in practice?
Not to stifle team’s creativity, the designer plays facilitator’s role. Making sure the team keeps the momentum, focuses on user pain-points, assures impartiality and that all opinions are heard. The designer will profit more, by running all these ideating activities before the team, and facilitating the team objectively. In the last, convergent phase, designer’s outcomes are revealed and together with the team’s ideas, they are voted on and refine to the one solution.
The team should be multidisciplinary, with different views and backgrounds, assuring diversity of perspectives, and broad range of ideas.
Diverge.
The designer starts with remembering the team about personas, their goals and pain-points. Goals already should be voted on, force ranked or prioritized, so the team know the 20% of opportunities, to work on. The designer is opening the story, emphasizing on persona’s pain-point (conflict), feeding emotions and propelling the team towards seeking solutions.
Team members start devising solutions for selected pain-points independently. They do it silently by writing down their ideas. It’s best to use the Crazy 8s method of a card folded thrice, forming 8 frames, and allow for multiple sketches, ideas, notes during 8 minutes (one idea per one frame).
After this initial phase, allocate the team some more time to develop one idea of their choosing onto another, 3-time folded paper, also silently and separately. This time their goal is to prepare a visual storyboard, tell the story, and present it to others. It doesn’t have to be a realistic, figurative sketch. Members will help themselves with pantomime and storytelling, to better explain the solution in front of others.
Emerge.
Now, you have several independent ideas, and you are sure these are bias free. But they may be noisy, very diverging solutions. You have to aggregate these solutions, and focus your team on the most promising one. It is time to share solutions with other team members and vote. Each team member presents their solution. Team members are dot-voting for a solution as a whole, but also for a portion of the solution. The goal is to select one worth developing, but you keep all team’s solutions fixed to the wall, in order to refer to some ‘alternative’ solutions, some good portions, and maybe even make a reversal after user testing.
When dot-voting is finished, you form teams (everything depends on the time available, but these can be as small as 2 people) and ask them to develop the selected solution into a storyboard.
Converge.
The key here is to have a couple of mature solutions. It may be the designer’s solution (developed before teamwork), this may be several sub-groups’ solutions. The Emerge phase allowed to have diverse ideas deeply explored, examined and experimented. Although outcomes are hardly predictable, the recipe here is to make a collage of these ideas into one. Take some ideas from other teams, feed with ignored questions, come up with one most promising solution. You do dot-voting for solutions, but also for separate portions, and end up with a sketchy collage. Your next step is to make a prototype from this solution.
Summary
The beauty of great solutions is the simplicity. No self-generated results are comparable with team-generated results. It’s easy to set up a team. These shouldn’t be designers, but if you can’t organize stakeholders…even your friends and relatives (“makeshift team”) can suffice.
1. Diverge on as many possible ideas as possible. Independently, and under time pressure. Vote.
2. Then make a solution emerge. The pattern here is to work in groups on the solution, vote for the best (portions or whole) and once again work in bigger groups.
3. Converge all solutions you have into one synthesis, prototype-ready.
4. Don’t throw out alternative ideas. You may need to come back to them.
Make sure to read: Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers. James Macanufo, Sunni Brown
