ideation

06 develop

what is ideation

First and foremost I believe this is a team activity and this is one of the most crucial part of the development process. What we want to get out of this is probably to create some extremely low fidelity ideas which can help the team visualise, think through, test and validate.

How to organise?

need probably a day
lot of ideas and enthusiasm
stickies, pens etc needed to sketch
remind everyone that we don’t need artists, dev team just needs to be able to express what they are thinking
usually I encourage team members to develop the ideas individually or in pairs
if possible try to save this wall for future

Stakeholders meaning who?

development team
business team
project sponsor
UX/Product research
fundamentally everyone …

Outcome:

lots of ideas in terms of sketches, questions
a likely prioritised set of ideas that we want to baseline and start the journey with
stitch the prioritised ideas/sketches so we have one product baseline

why do this

get ideas from everyone in the team
everyone associated in the project has the same understanding of the product
we will know from the beginning that some of the ideas would not be feasible immediately but they could be in the future roadmap

thing to watch out for

focus on creativity and not feasibility – at this stage we are only trying to harvest ideas and not trying to see what is feasible and what is not
the most powerful hippo doesn’t override
we are able to get everyone to talk and get their ideas out

01 personas

it is crucial to be able to define some specific representatives from the user community which will kind of cover the ecosystem we want to target. We will notice that as we move ahead with developing the ideas, there might be some changes to the target personas but we must have very clear definition of whom we want to target.

Some characteristics we want to capture:

name
age group
profession
gender
how they are connected to this product
their pains

02 ideas

I always encourage we develop low fidelity prototypes which is easier to debate and discuss. The idea is not to spend a lot of effort in the first round of ideation so that we can keep wastage low. If the team is experienced with developing wireframes using tools and prefer to do that then it is fine, but usually at this stage we want the team to generate ideas and not pay attention to beautifying the wireframes too much.

I have noticed that when we have a tool we tend to get into refinements and beautification rather than focussing on the ideas