From insights to ideas: HMW, ideate, and speed-dating

Hi everyone, this post is to introduce how team SynchronizED conducted ideation and downselected ideas guided by research and idea speed-dating!

To make sure that our design ideas are closely related to the research findings (all the design decision will have evidence!), we went through the following steps:

01 Translate insights into How Might We(HMW) questions

Through the affinity diagram, we got 10 key insights from the research stage. Then we rewrote insights using ‘I statement’ to found the stakeholder’s needs, frustration, and concerns. Based on these concerns, we came up with 28 How Might We (HMW) questions, covered all the insights categories.

Example of translating insights into HMW questions

02 Voting and merging

Then we conducted an internal ideation workshop! We had over 300 ideas in total. The detail of how we did it is in our prior post: Online design research: what and how? Then there came the question: How to synthesize those ideas?

Well, we had a review session and voted for our favorite 3 ideas under one topic.

The star is our votes!

After selecting 27 ideas, we organized them on a new board. Then we discussed these ideas and took notes about them. The yellow sticky notes at the end of the rows in the picture are our comments. The blue notes are aligned insights.

Also, we merged some similar ideas. We brought 21 ideas and moved to the next step: storyboarding.

Our idea board

03 Storyboarding and speed dating

For each idea, we drew a storyboard with 3 specific components —

(i) What problem will the idea solve?

(ii) How does the idea work?

(iii) The good impact of the idea.

Storyboards help us present the ideas more clearly to stakeholders. Our internal idea pitch ensured that all the storyboards were proofread before we show them to anyone else.

Storyboard example

Then it is time to test the ideas! We used speed dating to show all the storyboards to our stakeholders.

Speed dating is a user research method to test multiple ideas quickly with the intended users or stakeholders in a short time to figure out what are their real needs and concerns. This method is a good way to find out the future design direction. We conducted 3 speed dating sessions with our clients and finally selected 10 ideas.

04 Spring idea pitch

In our spring presentation, we showcased the 9 ideas to more stakeholders and grab their comments on the ideas. Also, we made an evaluation form for everyone.

Idea pitch evaluation form

Finally, we decided to work on 5 ideas from the 9 original ideas in the summer!👏