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What is ideation?

Ideation is a creative process where “participants gather with open minds to produce as many ideas as they can to address a problem statement in a facilitated, judgment-free environment” (interaction-design.org). The goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible—divergence—and then pick a single idea— convergence—to try based on technical feasibility, business viability, and user desirability.

Why ideation is valuable

Ideation is a valuable exercise because it allows the team to challenge commonly held beliefs and explore possibilities beyond these obstacles. Another benefit of doing an ideation exercise is that the team benefits from having a lot of different options to choose from and can build off each other’s ideas. It is much easier to get unique and creative ideas from a diverse group of people so make sure to include people with different perspectives, job titles, backgrounds, demographics, folks with different accessibility requirements, and varying levels of domain knowledge.

When to ideate

Ideation sessions take place in the Design phase of the UX Process. It is essential to ideate at the start of a project when you are trying to figure out what product to build or what service to design, but it is equally as important to have ideation sessions whenever the team starts working to solve a new problem. For example, run ideation sessions when the team moves on to the next outcome on its roadmap, or you learn something new about your users or the business.

How to ideate

Define the problem

Before the ideation session, you must create a problem statement to ideate for. Problem statements come from research findings and need to be validated with stakeholders and/or users.

Problem statements come in different formats and the scope can be broad like at the start of a project when we are trying to figure out a product to build, or more narrow and focused like when we are working on a new product feature. For example, the Marine Safety & Security program might ask “how might we protect Canadian waterways from oil and gas spills?”. A more narrow and focused problem statement for a particular outcome or feature might sound like “how might we inform users when they are dealing with a client that has an outstanding account balance?”

Check out the following article from Notion for a more detailed description of problem statements and how to write good ones: A comprehensive guide to writing problem statements.

Level-set the participants

It is important that all workshop participants agree on and understand the problem to be solved. This is called level-setting because it puts everyone on the same level by giving them just enough domain, environmental, and situational knowledge so that they can come up with potential ideas to solve the problem. Spend some time at the start of the session to give some context around the problem statement, and to describe the personas and the usage scenarios or use cases you want to ideate for.

Diverge and converge

When you’re in the divergence part of the session, the only goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible; there is no such thing as a bad idea.

When you have a large pool of ideas, the team must then converge on one idea that they will try to implement. As a group, discuss and rate each idea in terms of technical feasibility, business viability, and user desirability, and select the highest scoring option.

Keep in mind that the idea you choose to implement is still just a hypothesis and needs to be tested. Ask yourselves what is the smallest version of this idea that we can deliver so that we can evaluate if we are heading in the right direction? Determine how you will measure success, then implement, test, and evaluate the idea. If this solution doesn’t meet the measure of success, try one of the other ideas. Remember that this is not considered a failure, but instead is an opportunity to learn and improve. By working in short cycles and focusing on small slices of value, we can quickly pivot to a different solution if we learn we are moving in the wrong direction. Knowing what didn’t work is equally as valuable as knowing what does work.

Templates

There are a lot of brainstorming and ideating workshop templates available online. Miro’s opensource community, the Miroverse is a particularly fantastic resource for all sorts of workshop templates, including one of our favourite ideation techniques called Reverse Brainstorming.

Reverse brainstorming

Reverse Brainstorming acknowledges that although coming up with great ideas can sometimes be very difficult, humans can often more easily identify ideas for how to make something worse. The activity starts with flipping your problem statement to a negative. For example, if your problem statement is “how might we protect Canadian waters from oil and gas spills?”, the negative might sound like “how might we use oil and gas to cause as much damage as possible to Canadian waters?”. The next step is to come up with as many ideas as possible to achieve the negative result. The third step is to simply reverse each negative idea back to positives and all of a sudden, you have a list of great ideas to discuss.

Resources

What is ideation?

A comprehensive guide to writing problem statements