Ideate & Prototype
Imagining and Building solutions
UNDERSTAND & FRAME IDEATE & PROTOTYPE TEST & REFINE DEVELOP & LAUNCH The old saying holds true here: to have one good idea, have many ideas. At this stage, you will be generating many ideas to explore
different ways to solve the need you have identified, and you will be bringing these ideas into the physical world to have your users
interact with them. At the end of this stage, you should have a whole lot of ideas and a few rough prototypes ready to test with your
users.
Activities at this stage: 1.
Ideation
2. Prototyping
Innovators’ Guidebook, page 42
Ideation
What?
The process of “flaring” or “going wide” to generate as
many possible concepts or solution ideas as you can. The
goal is to explore a wide solution space, in terms of both
the quantity and diversity of ideas. From this collection of
ideas, you can identify the strongest concepts to prototype
and test with users.
Why?
Ideation enables you to transition beyond identifying problems to exploring solutions. When done well, ideation helps
you unlock your creativity and look past immediately obvious solutions. It also allows you to harness the collective
perspectives and strengths of your team as you uncover
and explore unexpected territory.
Agenda: week 9
Write How Might We statements for your
Point of View
Generate many diverse ideas
Select 1-4 ideas to prototype
How?
1.Prepare. Initiate ideation by generating 5-10 “how might we”
questions based on your POV. They should be broad enough
to catalyze a wide range of possible solutions, but narrow
enough to have helpful boundaries. For example “how might
we give each shopper a personal checkout experience?”
2. Generate ideas. Invest in the creative process. Be intentional about setting aside plenty of time to come up with ideas,
and experiment with different techniques.
3. Narrow ideas. Take a systematic approach to choosing
which ideas to pursue. The goal is to select a small set of
possible solutions to take into prototyping.
Center for Care Innovations, page 43
Ideation
How Might We...
How Might We statements help your team explore different
aspects of the point of view and carry out more focused brainstorms.
For example:
A full-time
working
Mom
pick up her sick
kid from daycare
without thinking
about cancelling
her doctor’s appointment
her worry about
her kid’s health is
compounded by the
guilt for not cancelling an appointment
How might the doctor be notified without her involvement?
How to proactively check with her if she can still make it?
How might she take care of her kid at her appointment?
How might daycare care for sick kids?
How to make her not feel guilty?
How might the doctor be OK if she doesn’t show up?
Notice that you are exploring ways to meet the need not only
from your organization’s point of view, but from all possible
angles that the need can be addressed. You never know which
way will work the best in the end.
Generate lots of How Might We statements for your POV. Choose the ones you are
excited about and conduct a brainstorm for each chosen How Might We statement.
Innovators’ Guidebook, page 44
Ideation
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Generate Ideas - Brainstorm
What?
A brainstorm is a group activity to rapidly come up with a lot of
ideas. It is an interactive way to build on ideas of others, think
fast, and end far from the initial ideas you started with.
Brainstorming Rules
Starting a brainstorm:
• Get off your chairs. Keep the energy high!
• Let time pressure help you - set a time for each
“How Might We” brainstorm
•Free your mind to think outside the box - get all
your ideas out in the open at the start
1. Defer judgment No blocking! No finding reasons why
it
won’t work!
2. Encourage wild ideas Think outside the box.
3. Build on the ideas of others No “buts, “only “ands.”
4. Go for quantity More is better! Make quantity your
goal
5. One idea at a time Let others have their say.
6. Stay focused on the topic
7. Be visual Sketch your ideas
8. Headline!
Keep it short. Save conversations for
later.
Center for Care Innovations, page 45
Symptom
Ideation
Have you observed that your
team is following ideas of a
more outspoken member?
DIAGNOSIS: Your team may be
suffering from “group-think”.
Leave your inhibitions at the
door!
TREATMENT:Structure exercises
to bring out different opin-
There is no such thing as a bad idea
ions and revisit the eight
when ideating! Be comfortable sharing
half-baked, crazy ideas. And stay conscious about recognizing and putting
Check
rules of brainstorming.
Watch out for group-think
aside nonconstructive thoughts. It may
feel counter-intuitive at first, but do
Group-think is a phenomenon that can occur when decision-making groups seek to avoid
your best to proactively encouraging
conflict. Groups with one particularly respected or vocal member are very susceptible to this
unrealistic ideas—as strange as it may
behavior, as participants often agree with an influential leader. As group-think increases, the
sound, the best ideas are often born
quality and diversity of ideas decreases!
out of the very worst.
You can diagnose group-think by recognizing these common symptoms: conforming behaviors, rationalization, stereotyping, self-censorship, pressure to agree, and the presence of the
“thought police” in the group.
The best way to breakout of group-think is to recognize that it is happening and to structure a
series of exercises designed explicitly to stimulate differing opinions. Revisit the seven rules of
brainstorming to try to help team members feel “safe” expressing divergent views.
Innovators’ Guidebook, page 46
Ideation
There are lots of different ways to brainstorm …
Warm up with a crazy
brainstorm
analogous brainstorm
Imagine there are no constraints whatsoever. Forget about being practical.
Get inspired by
How do you imagine the situation might work under these conditions?
In many ways, this is one of the bread-and-butter innovation tools. How do we see
What unreal, crazy ways can this be accomplished? This brainstorm is
other industries/entities tackling similar issues or achieving the results we want?
useful for getting out of the mindset of constraints and remembering the
Another way to use this technique: where do we see the same problem and why is
limitations of the system. It’s also great to get inspiration – yes, it might be
that industry failing to solve it? Analogous brainstorming is great for getting inspired
crazy, but is there any truth here that we can take away from this?
by the ways things work elsewhere and seeing possible blind spots in your own processes by seeing where others are failing.
Throw out constraints with
ideal brainstorm
What do we envision as the ideal situation for this area? What specific
attributes make this situation ideal? How would the stakeholders feel/
behave in this situation? This is great for inspiration and getting everyone
on the same page as to what they are trying to achieve.
Explore blind spots with
sabotage brainstorm
What are all the ways we can fail and NOT meet the need? What ways can we think
of that will not give the result we want? How can we design this process that will
make it fail miserably? This can help with outlining risk factors for the success of a
process, uncovering the possible blind spots of risk factors (“wait, that’s how it’s
done now!”) or even just feeling free to create something silly – which could be
used to unleash the mind when things get stagnant.
“The more ideas, the better. If you
think you were successful coming up
with 20 ideas, then dare yourself to
come up with 80 next time. And when
you get to 80 ideas, try for 200.”
bodystorm
Act out ideas with a
Create a set - or take your team to a real environment that harbors the process you are redesigning. Bring artifacts, act out your user’s journey, and
generate ideas on the fly in this life-sized brainstorm.
Center for Care Innovations, page 47
Ideation
Symptom
Do you find yourself thinking
that your idea - or someone
Come back with fresh
else’s just won’t work?
“I was able to generate many
ideas after walking away from
the problem for a while.”
DIAGNOSIS: You are suffering
from the “No, but...” (aka
“devil’s advocate”) syndrome.
TREATMENT: Be patient. There
will be time later on to dis-
Check
sect each idea for feasibility. Focus on generating ideas
and find inspiring things to
take even from the crazy ones.
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Innovators’ Guidebook, page 48
e tea
Ideation
Being self-conscious is
the enemy of ideation!
Involving outsiders
“Asking another team to join our
brainstorming session was great. I think
it helps to get an outside perspective
because it forced us to explain our
problem simply but effectively so that
the other group’s contributions would
be productive. It felt good that they were
so engaged in offering ideas—they really
wanted to help us.”
“The problem that I faced when ideating is I become overly concerned
about how my ideas will be perceived. Most of my ideas never leave
my mind because of my internal
calculations and scrutinizing.”
Celebrate half-baked ideas
“My teammates were helpful in
processing half-baked ideas. Once
I shared them, people were able to
elaborate on them. This ‘concept/
comment’ loop was critical in sparking
other ideas.”
Judgment is the “cooler” for ideation!
“We deferred all judgment during brainstorming and went
for quantity. The trick was not to give any idea more than a
few seconds of our time when it was stated and documented.
We quickly moved on to other ideas until we were ready to
converge or begin evaluating possible solutions.”
Center for Care Innovations, page 49
Ideation
Narrow down Ideas
At this point, you will have generated many ideas. How do you pick the
ones to prototype? Before worrying about feasibility, get the ideas you
are excited about into the hands of users.
1. Idea morph
ing
Visually represen
t your ideas (e.g
., by writing them
its) and then look
on Postfor synergistic w
ays to reduce th
number by com
e total
bining entire idea
s or selectively m
elements of wea
ixing
ker ideas to form
a stronger one.
2. Post-it votin
g
Each team mem
ber gets three Po
st-it notes to plac
the ideas that ar
e next to
e most appealin
g to them.
3. Four catego
ry voting
Choose one or tw
o ideas from the
following four ca
(1) the rational,
tegories:
(2) the most likel
y to delight the
long shot, and (4
user, (3) the
) the darling (m
ost likable to th
e team).
4. Bingo select
ion
Select ideas that
inspire you to bu
ild different kind
types—a physic
s of protoal, digital, and ex
perience prototyp
e.
5. 2x2 Decisio
n matrix.
TIP: Let go of “my idea”
“One great advantage of our team
was that no one was too personally
invested in any single idea. So we
were able to try a few possibilities
and openly discuss them.”
Techniques for
narrowing down
ideas …
Feeling Stuck?
• Don’t debate - test!
If you can’t agree on which ideas
to prototype, let your users decide
- build rough versions of ideas and
get user feedback.
Innovators’ Guidebook, page 50
Toolbox Download:
Decision Matrix
Prototyping
What?
A physical, interactive representation of your solution.
Creating a series of prototypes allows you to advance your
thinking about each element of the solution and, eventually, how they will come together to address your problem. A
prototype also provides a mechanism for actively engaging
users in evaluating and guiding aspects of the solution as
they interact with these physical models.
Why?
The point is to get feedback on how well your solution
is – or is not – solving the need of your users. The value
of prototyping is testing an idea fast before much time or
resources have been invested in it.
• Build to think. Creating rough representations of your
•
•
•
solutions will further your understanding of what the
solution might look like.
Get answers. The most basic prototypes enable you
to test the functionality of an idea (will it work?).
More sophisticated prototyping will get deeper feedback by testing different aspects
Gain more empathy. By observing how your users
interact with you prototype, you can get closer to
understanding how to meet their needs.
Get unstuck. Teams can easily get bogged down with
conflicting opinions about different aspects of an
idea. Prototypes help advance these discussions by
making them more concrete and eliminating miscommunication.
Agenda: week 10
Choose which aspects of your ideas you
will prototype
Create an interactive prototype for each
idea
Make arrangements for prototype testing
with users and stakeholders
“A picture is worth a
thousand words. A
good prototype is
worth a thousand
pictures.”
–Tom Kelley
(innovation guru)
Center for Care Innovations, page 51
Prototyping
How?
Initially, a prototype is not fully a functional product or service. Instead, it expresses a particular aspect of an idea that
the designer wants to explore. These prototypes should be
made quickly, using simple designs and surrogate materials so that you can rapidly and inexpensively accumulate
insights. Over time, through multiple iterations of the prototype-test loop, your models will become more refined on
their way to representing a complete solution. Here’s how to
get started:
1.Identify the idea you want to prototype. Break it down
into separable, buildable, testable
components and decide which ones you want to test.
2. Brainstorm different ways to represent the aspects you
want to test.
3. Build your prototypes fast, cheap, and low-resolution.
A prototype
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Innovators’ Guidebook, page 52
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Prototyping
There are different ways to prototype …
A miniature set
A physical object
Model railroads and doll houses are back! Use foam core and push pins to
create a set of the space you are innovating it. Go through the process to
find out pitfalls. Get your users to show you how they would behave in this
space. Give them materials and have them build what they would like to see.
Cardboard, foam core, glue, paper, markers - use these simple
materials.
Role-play
A digital interface
Create a life-size set - or go to the actual environment and modify it with
simple materials to be the way you envision. Act out all the steps of the
process. Bring in your users and have them navigate this new environment.
Paper and pen sketches of sequences of screen shots can take
your user through an experience navigating a digital interface.
Storyboard
Map out every distinct step of your user’s journey with rough sketches.
Storyboards are not great interactive prototypes (so make sure to build a
few that are). They are, however, a good way to communicate to others your
vision of the solution.
“It is often very easy to confuse ideas and prototypes. It took us quite
a bit of time to understand the concept that our users should be able
to ‘interact’ with the prototype. Once we got over this challenge, the
experience of building and sharing our prototype with users proved to
be a tremendously rewarding experience.”
Center for Care Innovations, page 53
Prototyping
Tips for starting your prototyping
Break it down
Fail Quickly, Fail Cheaply
As tempting as it might be to create a
There are two opposing purposes to proto-
complete version of the final solution,
typing: Will it work? and How can it fail?
building a separate prototype for different
Building a minimal prototype that rep-
aspects of the solution will give you more
resents a feature you want to test quickly
insight into what works for your users.
and cheaply allows you to move on before
investing a lot of resources.
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Innovators’ Guidebook, page 54
Prototype for interaction
A prototype will give the most meaningful
insights when a user can interact with it in
a way that is close to the final version of
the solution. So, even if you are testing an
aspect of the final solution, aim to make it
interactive
“Identify what you want to test with each version of your
prototype. Each prototype should be designed to answer a
particular question when tested.”
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Center for Care Innovations, page 55
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Innovators’ Guidebook, page 56
Prototyping
What former innovators say...
Stay focused on the user
Dive in head-first
“Start building. Even if you aren’t
sure what you’re doing, the act of
picking up some materials will be
enough to get you going. Paper,
tape, and found objects are a
good place to start!”
Choices work
“Build with the user in mind. What do you hope
to test with the user? What sorts of behavior
do you expect? Answering these questions will
help focus your prototyping and help you receive
meaningful feedback in the testing phase.”
“Make and test several prototypes at once so you can make
comparisons across them and
have better information as
to why something works and
something else doesn’t.
Be prolific
Rough is enough
“Because time for testing prototypes with users may be
very limited, I would suggest generating as many prototypes as you can. That way, if your top three prototypes
are not welcomed by the users, you have back-up ideas
you can test right away during that meeting, rather than
having to make a separate appointment for it.”
“Don’t over-invest in a
prototype, so you can
more readily move on to
the next one and so people
feel more open to offering
suggestions and criticism
that may improve it.”
Keep moving
“Don’t spend too long on any
one prototype. Move on before you find yourself getting
too emotionally attached.”
TIP: The
Keep it minimal
“The process led us to simplify our
prototype concepts. We stripped down
the features to be the most basic ones,
as we tried initially to put too much in,
diluting the core value proposition while
distracting and confusing users.”
is getting
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n!”
Center for Care Innovations, page 57
Prototyping
Moving on...
Don’t get attached!
“You don’t have
to see the whole
staircase, just take
the first step.”
–Martin Luther King,
Jr. (activist)
Teams almost always struggle at the onset
of the PROTOTYPE stage. In general, they
spend far too much time talking about which
solution, or aspect of a solution, to build. If
you wait too long before you start creating,
you have a tendency to fall in love with the
idea(s) you’re discussing. Once you get emotionally involved with the solution or its key
features, you won’t want to see your baby
fail. The risk is that you may start defining
test conditions that will ensure the model
succeeds.
Innovators’ Guidebook, page 58
Conversely, when you jump in and start building prototypes more readily, you’re far less likely to become wedded to
any given feature or solution. Through the building process,
you advance your thinking and more quickly discover the value of the “letting go” process associated with rapid iterations
of the prototype-test loop.
As you begin getting consistent, positive feedback from
users about certain aspects of your solution, that’s the time
to start thinking about “going steady” with an idea. Be on
the look-out for those elements that are brilliantly received—
they’re the ones that deserve your attachment (and are worth
pursuing!).
Prototyping
Strike a balance!
Prepare to come back here again...
Prototypes are explicitly intended to allow users to
experience some aspect of your solution (not have
you tell them about it!). In designing and building
a prototype, you need to be sure that the model is
well-developed enough that it supports the target user
experience when it’s time for testing.
On the other hand, remember that, at its core,
each prototype is little more than
a prop that’s meant to
simulate a specific
interaction. Be careful
not to over-invest in terms of your time
and energy. Ask yourself frequently,
“What is the minimum we have to build
to get the key idea across?”
This can be a tricky balancing act that often requires a bit of trial and error. Teams usually start to
get the hang of it after building their first couple of
prototypes.
Prototyping and testing (the next step in the design thinking
process) are part of a highly iterative, frequently-repeated
loop. Prototyping gets your ideas out of your head, while
testing reveals users’ explicit, unspoken, and perhaps even
subconscious requirements, preferences, and decision-making criteria. Allowing yourself to be guided by frequent user
feedback to build what works can save you a lot of energy
and resources.
Once you build your prototypes, it’s time to
TEST them. Press forward ahead to the
next step in the innovation process!
Center for Care Innovations, page 59