- Now you've turned your customer research
into tools that you can use to help you build a product
that people would really want to use.
You have your experience map, your pain points,
your goals, and your personas.
It will be a shame to waste all this effort
by just going ahead and building the first idea
that comes to mind from the research.
That's because your first idea,
isn't likely to be your best one.
Getting together as a team
and building off each other's ideas
is much more likely to give you an optimal solution.
I like to get the team together to do an ideation exercise
in this environment, every team member
spends some time coming up
with multiple different ideas on their own.
Once they've had some time,
maybe just 15 minutes to quickly sketch out their ideas,
everyone takes it in turn to share what they drew
with the rest of the group.
Some of these ideas may be crazy,
but even those can inspire other people
to come up with workable solutions
they may never otherwise have considered.
Having everyone in the room is fun
because often different disciplines
come up with different types of ideas.
For instance, for our project,
one of the technologists was talking about GPS
and tracking solutions,
whereas marketing considered flyers at the Trail head.
One of the designers wanted to give
each trail maintenance tool a personality and history,
so people cared more about ensuring the tools
were kept in good condition.
The only rule with ideation
is there's no such thing as a bad idea.
The goal at the moment is creativity, not workability.
After this first round of sketching and sharing,
everyone takes the combined ideas of the whole group,
and does another round of sketching.
This round can either be done individually
like the first round or in smaller groups.
The point of having people work individually
and then get together is to stop one person
or one idea from dominating the conversation.
Everyone, even the people who are normally
quiet in large groups gets a chance to have their say
and share their ideas.
At the end of the ideation session
you'll have a wall full of sketches.
Some will be completely unattainable
but even those might well have sparked other ideas
which are much more workable.