Wednesday

Envision solutions

Now, you're going to envision solutions that will help your persona meet their goals.

Create an ideation prompt

Now that you have developed a persona and understand their needs to the best of your ability, create a problem statement for your project, which we call an ideation prompt. Here are a few tips to help you create useful ideation prompts:

Frame it in an optimistic, positive way

Negative framing has a tendency to shut down thinking rather than to open it up, and we want to create a space of possibility. So, for example, rather than using the ideation prompt, "how might we make the pre-flight experience less confusing?", we might say instead, "how might we make the pre-flight experience feel easy?"

Keep it solution agnostic

You do not want to plant ideas into the prompt. You want the prompt itself to trigger lots of ideas that you don't even have right now. For example, rather than using the ideation prompt, "how might we create a luggage tracking app?", you might say instead, "how might we help customers feel confident their luggage will arrive safely?"

Make sure your prompt is not too broad

So for example, the ideation prompt, "how might we make the customer happy?", really addresses too big of a problem – it's hard to even know where to begin with that. So instead, you could say, "how might we inject a sense of playfulness into the pre-flight experience? "You also want to make sure that your prompt is not too narrow. So, for example, the prompt, "How might we reduce the steps in the check-in process?", will force you to focus solely on making the current process more efficient, rather than thinking holistically about how to transform the service experience completely. So a better ideation prompt would be, "How might we make the pre-flight experience feel effortless?"

Exercise: write a few of your own ideation prompts in your notebook.

Checking your prompt

Let's talk about the ideation prompt you just wrote. How did it go? Look at your prompt and ask yourself, did you frame the challenge positively, or did you use the word no or not in there anywhere?

Now, let's check for solutions in your ideation prompt. Does your prompt say something like "How might we build an app that...", or otherwise include some kind of prescribed solution? If it does, that's okay, but take a moment right now and rewrite the ideation prompt so that it's solution-agnostic.

And also, check on whether the ideation prompt is too broad or too narrow. For example, an ideation prompt like, "How might we make the customer happy? "is really too broad to be helpful, and a prompt like, "How might we reduce the steps of the check-in process?", is just going to limit your thinking to the current state solution.

Now that you have a great ideation prompt, you are almost ready to brainstorm.

Solve your ideation prompt

Start with “what if?” The "What if?" prompt is a series of short questions that force new thinking to help you solve your ideation prompt in a really unique way. For example, what if our persona never had to check in? Or, what if it were like a treasure hunt? Or, what if it made your persona laugh?”

What if?" prompts help you to imagine and explore many different, distinct pathways so that you can generate lots of different kinds of ideas. Removing or adding an entire part of the experience with a prompt like, "What if our persona never had to type anything?" Or we might have tried adding a new actor or a partner to the experience with a prompt like, "what if our this user wanted to use with their whole family?" Or we might have borrowed approaches from other industries with a prompt like, "what if it worked like a game?"

When you use "What if?" prompts, you'll want to keep your persona in mind – generating solutions for them specifically – because remember, we're not solving for everyone, we're solving for the design target that we've chosen based on our research. And lastly, remember that time constraints are your friend. So for each prompt, give yourself one to five minutes max. It's going to force you to come up with lots and lots of ideas rather than fixating on one.

Exercise: take out your list of ideation prompts and start using the "what if" approach to get thinking differently.

Brainstorm solutions

Now that you’ve maxed out your ideation prompt, it is time to envision solutions! Below, we provide brainstorming strategies to guide you as you generate solutions.

More, Faster!

The goal in ideation is quantity, it's not quality. Focusing on getting ideas right or trying to make them perfect will just get you stuck. Now the trick to coming up with lots of ideas is embracing the notion that no idea is bad. And that means that you have to do something really hard – you have to turn off your inner critic. Some of the best solutions that we've come up with started with an idea that, on the surface, frankly didn't seem particularly compelling, but through the process of ideation, that idea bloomed.

Set a time limit

Give yourself a short time limit for ideation, somewhere between, say, 5-15 minutes. And while the tight time constraint can seem really daunting, it actually does something amazing – it totally takes the pressure off. It forces you to be much less precious about your ideas and that helps ideas flow really quickly. We also purposely separate the generation of ideas from the evaluation of ideas. Why is that? Well, it's because it's really hard to get into the ideation mindset where ideas flow freely and your thinking is unrestrained. As soon as you start evaluating that little inner critic kicks in and it naturally shuts down the ideation part of your brain. So, generate, don't evaluate. That will help you create more ideas faster.

Anything is possible

At this phase, don't worry about feasibility – think really big. What would you do if you had access to unlimited resources? What if you didn't have to worry about navigating organizational politics? Or what if you could do something that seems technologically impossible right now?

If you start in an open field of possibility you're going to be surprised by what you can come up with. You can think about constraints later and refine your ideas accordingly and you should. But if you start with constraints, your solutions, at best, will be incrementally better than other solutions that exist already and that is not the path to innovation.

Exercise: take out your ideation prompts and using the strategies above, envision solutions and write them down in your notebook.