Idea War — Our favourite UX collaboration this year.
My recent collaboration (Yeremia Yudha, William Stefan Hartono and Michael Lioe) at tiket.com with UX Researchers and Designers, a star wars themed event, called Idea War — Product Hack 2018, where Product People of tiket.com spent 2 days battling their ideas for a better product in 2019.
Disclaimer: this event is internal-team purposed only.
Introduction
Product Hack is a home where Product people could express their passion through events. The first event was Idea War, an ideation workshop, where Product people and several friends from other divisions learn to ideate rapidly and have a place to gather their extraordinary ideas for tiket.com in 2019.
Product people are looking forward to seeing in 2019 more product managers, UI and UX designers and researchers contributing their ideas to tiket.com. Most importantly, nurturing productive-communication amongst teams and increasing sense of belonging.
Venue, Agenda, and Attendees
The first Idea War was held on 19th-20th December 2018, located at Kawung Room, Grha Niaga Thamrin 6th floor. This event was attended by around 45 people from different roles, including: product managers, UI and UX designers, UX researchers, engineers and also data scientists. These 45 people are distributed into 6 teams, where each team will have at least a product manager, a designer, and a data person.
Programme
First of all, this event is named Idea War. But what is ideation? According to some of point of views, ideation is a structured process guiding people through a number of exercise to come up with innovative ideas. The process itself would be better if the attendees come from multi-disciplinary or even multi-cultural people. Doing so would produce more innovative and creative ideas for the community.
This event is expected to give three results as stated below.
- Vision ideas for product roadmap (the product roadmap 2019 is already discussed and well-planned),
- Product growth metrics and,
- Preliminary design concept.
For making this Idea War easier to be explored, the committee team has decided to use Double Diamond approach.
The Double Diamond Process
Double diamond diagram/process was developed through in-house research at the Design Council in 2005 as a simple graphical way of describing the design process. This diagram was formed by four different stages: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver.
The committee team split the 4 different stages in two days. Day-1 covered: Define and Develop stages, while Day-2 covered: Develop and Deliver stages.
Discover: How we discover the problems?
To start this stage, we chose Rapid Thinking method. Rapid thinking is about how to produce or generate ideas as many as possible in a short amount of time. This activity has the goal to challenge every participant to push their ability for idea production. Another goal of rapid thinking is so that each time people have an issue/problem/project to solve, they will go back to using rapid thinking.
Before it was started, all participants were divided into three groups. Each group represents different phase of tiket.com user experience (x’piration, consume and post-purchase).
Next, we exercised Think, Feel, Say, Do — Model. This model was chosen because it was assumed that product people might be more familiar with this model as a user empathy map. This model is helpful for synthesising research data in order to understand what user needs and wants.
We combined the Think, Feel, Say, Do — Model with the Rapid Thinking method. Each team was asked to start the rapid thinking process. So, the rapid thinking method was done 4 times, one for each of the empathy group: Think, Feel, Say, and Do.
Every round of rapid thinking consisted of:
- 5 minutes of bombing ideas. Each member of the groups were asked to note down their ideas. There were no limitations, no matter how wild the idea was, they could note it down.
- 5 minutes of discussing the ideas. As a team, each member rapidly explained their ideas to the other team members. Then, the team chose what ideas were the best for them.
- 2 minutes of presentation. Each team presented their best ideas to the other teams.
Define: How we define the problems to map out set of solutions?
After finishing 4 rounds of rapid thinking, there were hundreds of statements on sticky notes, and they were so cluttered. Product people needed a tool to define the statements. What are those, what does it mean? What is the connection? Is it clausal statement?
Hence, we used affinity diagram, a tool to generate, organise and consolidate information concerning a product, process, complex issue, or problem. The diagram was created in the 1960s by Kawakita Jiro and is also known as the KJ method.
When to use affinity diagram? Normally, it helps when issues seem too large or too complex to explain. It simplifies the issues by clustering and bundling ideas and facts, then making the groups of ideas into conceptual framework.
At the end of this stage, each group produced a maximum of 3 problem statements. Then from each problem statement, every group should produce as many as possible solutions.
Develop: How we develop our set of solutions to be more concrete?
At this stage, activities are designed to map participants’ solution ideas to be more concrete.
Concept Model. “Is a visual representation to help you understand the different kinds of information that your product needs to display.” — boxesandarrows.com.
A concept model itself is constructed only from nouns and verbs. Each noun is represented as a circle, and each noun is connected with an arcs labeled with verb. Concept model is very helpful in understanding how the site/feature actually works.
Prototyping. Prototyping is very important to design process. A prototype should help team evaluating and testing the proposed idea or design. Making a prototype usually also clarify production issues and costs.
Each team can make their own prototype. It can be a low fidelity prototype by only using drawings on paper or even a high fidelity prototype complete with the UI. This is possible because each group has at least one designer, who could help to visualise the idea to be a prototype.
Deliver: How we produce the product where it is finalised and launched in the relevant market?
The usability testing. Previously, every group should finish their prototype. The next activity was to test them. Doing usability testing early is very important because we could get feedbacks even before the product is made. Knowing that you are making the wrong product is a fatal mistake because it eats budget, wastes time, and disappoints people involved in the product. Each group needed to find at least 5 testers to try on their prototype.
Compiling all the works. Each team were required to prepare their final presentation for the final war. It could be a presentation, a video, or anything. The only limitation was they had to include all of the processes they’ve been through, from beginning to end. What were their problem statements, how did they approach it, what did they propose to solve the problems, their concept model, everything.
The final presentation. The War begins. At this time, finally the war began. Each group presented their process and the result, started by explaining their problem statements, selected solutions, the concept model and showing the UT result.
The war was thrilling! Everyone was excited and tried to convince other teams that they were delivering the greatest idea. After all of the groups finished the presentation, all of the people gathered to vote and find the winner.
Overall, everyone loved the results! and we are looking forward to have a similar event soon!
Future Recommendation
Idea War — Product Hack made Product people not only challenged themselves on ideation process, but also importantly they spent great time bonding to each other. These kind of activities are good to be implemented regularly for every project, where team could push their best and involve more perspectives to result better product. On the next idea war, more methods of thinking and ideation process should be applied, we might try design thinking or design sprint.
As a UX Researcher, personally, I recommend this kind of activity not only for Product division on a tech company, but also it was really good for different division to be familiar with ideation process. We just might not realised yet, how important design thinking on everything is.
Thank you so much for reading through! So, what’s next?
Originally published at itsmeidira.com on Jan 2, 2019.
