2.1 Ideate
2.1.1 Objective
Ideation is the stage when you come up with ideas on how you might solve the design challenge. It's the phase that comes after discovery and is all about exploring multiple possible design solutions rather than getting locked into the first idea that comes up. Although some stakeholders may want to rush through ideation into solutions, it is important to allow ample time for this stage as the first solution is not always the optimal one. The goal is to create many ideas or concepts based on what you've learned during your research. You will rank and refine the ideas later.
Start exploring ideas using a design thinking process, which means your team, in collaboration with product’s users, will conduct exercises to brainstorm solutions to the defined design challenge. Create rapid prototypes that can be tested. Then evaluate the solution and refine the prototypes based on findings.
2.1.2 What you will be doing
2.1.3 Steps and tools you can use
a. Place personas in the system, understand how users interact with the business processes and what actions they will be taking
Pick the personas you created in the last step and place them in the system. This will help you identify how they will interact with the business processes and with the system. There are a range of tools that will assist you with mapping the user journey such as storyboards - find a template here.
b. Identify paths and solutions for the problem the product is trying to solve
The team can now start brainstorming solutions. A good exercise to begin with is asking ‘How might we’. This is a collaborative exercise that can be performed in-person or remotely using online tools. You can find more information about this type of design thinking exercise in this blog. You can find an example here of how we used a ‘How might we’ exercise as part of a discovery workshop for Jerasaun Foun. In this case, the exercise was conducted remotely using an online tool called Miro. You can also prepare similar exercises in other online platforms such as InVision Freehand and Google Jamboard. You should access Google Jamboard with your @catalpa.io account. To access Miro and InVision, reach out to the Head of Products or the Design Manager.
After the exercise, begin to group ideas into themes and summarise these for the next steps of the process. In this example Invision board - you can see we bundled ideas by theme on the group brainstorm board.
c. Defined product vision, design & accessibility principles and value proposition *🥇
Knowing the problem (or the pain points), understanding the user, the context and how they will interact with your product, the team should have enough information to prepare the Product Vision. As an example you can find the product vision for Bero on page 9 of the Bero brand guide.
Work with the design team to prepare the Design Principles - those that will guide all design directions and decisions. Find an example of the original design principles that we defined for Bero (formerly known as Canoe).
Accessibility should always be a consideration for any product we develop. As part of this step, you should identify what is important for your users when it comes to accessibility and define the accessibility principles for the product. For this you may want to consider industry standards (for example W3C) as well as the context and inclusivity aspects (for example, content should be accessible to users with visual impairments).
Related to accessibility and design principles, the team should also consider any relevant performance principles for the product. This will be informed by the results of 1.3 - Empathise, particularly by activity b). What are the key performance considerations for the product? Does it need to work offline? Does it need to be fast to load? Do you have a target maximum app size you want to secure (e.g. app should be less than 10MB or shouldn’t take more than X seconds to load in a connection Y)? Should it have a resilient cache? Lead engineer will help to understand what targets are achievable and the constraints of each solution / alternative that the team needs to consider to make this decision.
To better understand and define the Value Proposition of the product, you may want to use a Business model canvas (also known as lean canvas). Here is an example of how we use the business model canvas for Bero.
Create your Product Pitch - this is a short statement where you say how your product is solving the problem. Find Bero’s product pitch on the brand guide (page 6)
Define the product Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and prepare a first draft of the design document for the MVP. An MVP is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development. The design document for the MVP will help your design and development team to get started on preparing prototypes for the initial iteration of the product. See the template we use for design documents and see an example of a MVP design document for our product, Estrada.
d. Prototype *🥇
Start making ideas visible and tangible so you can test them with users and iterate based on the received feedback. This can be done by creating prototypes. Depending on the time available and how quickly you want to iterate the solution, the team may decide using low fidelity prototypes (e.g. rapid sketch, app storyboards) or high fidelity prototypes (e.g. interactive app UI/UX mockups). See here an example of a rapid prototyping session for the Bero self registration and onboarding process, and here an example of a high fidelity prototype for Bero’s offline sync feature.
Ideally you will be prototyping the product MVP, though in some cases you may need to start exploring prototypes of future modules/iterations of the product.
Use your prototype to test the solution with some users and iterate on the solution based on their feedback. Frequent user testing with proposed solutions with fewer users is preferred to one-off user testing with lots of users. This allows you to go back, review the prototype and test again as many times as you need.
One good exercise you can use to collect feedback in a prototype is the ‘I like / I wish / What if’ exercise. This exercise can be conducted remolety (using Miro, Jamboard or InVision, for example) or in-person (using butcher paper/white board and sticky notes). You will need to prepare a board with 3 columns: 1) I like, 2) I wish, 3) What if. The ‘I like’ column will allow the team to collect feedback on things the participants enjoy on the prototype - for example ‘Color scheme’. ‘I wish’ column will help you map things the participants expect to see/be able to do on the platform and can’t with the current prototype. The third column ‘What if’ can help the group explore further some ideas on how to address specific needs that the product will try to answer. After presenting a prototype to the group of stakeholders, you can task them to silently brainstorm their feedback on each column. If a number of feedback is provided, you can also use dot voting to identify the most important aspects to the co-hort.
You can see how the Jerasaun Foun team used this exercise for a remote session, to collect feedback on UI/UX prototypes for key actions that the platform needed to offer.
Another tool to collaborate in design review sessions, is printing or screening the prototypes to a whiteboard or butcher paper (or in an online tool if done remotely) and together writing discussed feedback on top of mockups and UI prototypes. This will work best in a small group (less than 5 people), while I like/wish/what if can be better if you have a larger group in the room.
c. Create a brand for the product
A brand is the way a product, company or individual is recognised by those who experience it. A brand helps users and clients to distinguish one product from another.
We recommend conducting a branding workshop with the internal team as well as with partners and users. This is a great way to gather ideas for the brand logo, name and personality, while also providing a great opportunity for collaboration and gaining buy-in from your users and partners. Use this Brand brainstorming workshop template to help you organise a branding workshop. You can also use this template of Brand brainstorming workshop slides to help you conduct the workshop. During the workshop you can use a range of tools like silent brainstorming, mind mapping, dot voting, bundle ideas, rapid sketch, personality sliders, brand personality mapping etc.
An example of a final outcome of this exercise is the Brand Guide for Bero.
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