From Sticky Note to Storyboard: Developing and Evaluating Ideas
In our last blog post, Lab member and designer extraordinaire, Katie Briggs walked through our process of gathering context around a complex problem like leveraging digital scale to drive value to NPR Member stations. If you haven’t read that post you should definitely check it out. During this phase, we resisted the urge to come up with solutions, so needless to say the team was chomping at the bit to get their ideas out. In this post we’ll share how we went about that process in three steps: Brainstorming, Sketching and Storyboarding.
Brainstorming
At this point in the process, the first step you might take to get ideas out is a traditional brainstorming exercise. Bust out the good old Sharpie and Sticky Notes to start generating ideas.
There are some key rules of brainstorming that we abided by and that anyone else thinking of doing a similar session should keep in mind. These rules are critical because they enable all participants to think openly and freely in order to generate big and small ideas alike.
After a couple rounds of brainstorming we had several dozen ideas, some that were simple and others that were so complex that they made our heads hurt. As we shared our ideas, each team member talked through what they were thinking when they wrote it down to give the others a little more context.
With all those ideas on paper, we then clustered them together where they felt like they were similar or perhaps connected. As we did that, there were some themes that started to emerge. So we pulled the ideas together around those themes and organized them so that we could see them more clearly. Take a look below.
Grouping the ideas this way helped us understand how our ideas connected with one another in a simple way. We began to see overlap and patterns in the ideas that had been generated. But at this point all the ideas were still just a few words on a sticky note — nowhere near fully formed concepts. So the next step was to get a little more detailed with our ideas.
Sketching
To do this we worked through some sketching exercises. First we did a round of crazy eights, a design sprint method from GV (formerly Google Ventures). In the exercise, each person does eight sketches in eight minutes. The goal here isn’t to precisely illustrate each and every idea. The sketches should be simple, imperfect representations of your idea that help you communicate it to others. Here’s what they looked like:
Once we visualized with crazy eights, we shared our work with each other and asked questions.
Then we voted on those sketches. Each person got three votes. You could vote for your own sketch or someone else’s and you could vote for the same thing more than once. The purpose of the voting wasn’t to pick an idea to push forward, but rather to develop a heat map to see which ideas were drawing interest from the group.
With the votes in mind, we did one final round of sketching. In the final round each team member did just one sketch that illustrated one idea. The idea didn’t have to be the one that got the most votes, but knowing which ideas people were drawn towards certainly helped each of us decide what we wanted to sketch out.
After the final round of sketching we had illustrated six ideas, with varying degrees of overlap.
Then we did some informal gut checks around the ideas. Asking for each idea, “is this addressing our key insight statements?” After using that as a parameter, we had four ideas left, summarized simply here:
Then we got a little tougher on our ideas, pitting them up against one another in order to assess the viability, desirability and feasibility of each concept. To do this we used three simple 2x2 matrices, where the y-axis for each was always impact and the x-axes were viability, desirability and feasibility. Here’s what that looked like:
The idea that landed highest on each of these 2x2s was “custom events/smarter messaging”. So we knew that was the concept we would explore more with storyboarding.
Storyboarding
The idea we decided to explore more was leveraging custom event tracking, or more simply, user actions, on NPR digital properties in order to power smarter calls to action with a goal of moving users through the funnel and ultimately getting them to donate to their station. Essentially, leveraging the things we know about a user to ask them the right message at the right time. This concept was something we were all excited about, but we were each still thinking about it in slightly different ways. So to help bring our thinking together and refine our concept more we developed storyboards to help with the process.
We knew this concept had two core components, one that was audience facing and one that was station facing. On the audience side, we knew we wanted to be asking different users to do different things based on their actions. On the station side, we knew we wanted to create a tool that allowed stations to see more information on the leads we identify for them. So we broke up into three groups of two and had each group illustrate both sides of the concept, generating three storyboards for the audience side and three storyboards for the station side.
Here are a couple examples:
Audience-facing component
Station-facing component
These storyboards allowed us to see how each team was imagining this same idea, and helped everyone see pieces of the concept that we hadn’t yet thought about. As we discussed our different interpretations of the idea we talked about what those differences meant and how we might rethink the concept. Right now we’re in the process of refining the idea even more. We’ve begun sharing the storyboards with some of our Subject Matter Experts from the “We’re All Ears: Gathering Context Around A Complex Problem” post, for feedback. As we do that we’re going to be building on the idea, asking more questions, and potentially pivoting to explore others too.
Do you have an idea you’d like to share? Or, do you have questions about our process? Send us a note at incubationlab@npr.org
