Ideate Solution in a Nutshell. Hello friends! This post is my first…
By: Fauzan Ramadhan
Tags: Design Sprint, Ideation, Design Thinking, Solutions, Startup

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

Hello friends! This post is my first post using English. I’m so sorry if it’s a little bit confusing, but I hope it can give you a clear explanation. Ok, let’s start!

How to create the right solution for the user, or even ourselves? We need the most meaningful solution with the lowest cost needed. How can it come? Inevitably, it comes by the bank of ideas — ideation process. Together. We call it a brainstorming process.

Brainstorm process is a part of the ideation process. It diverges the idea of all team members so we can get all great ideas from them. The keys to doing this activity are comfort in expressing opinion, openness, and out of the box ideas. Don’t afraid of being wrong; there is no bad idea! But what should be thought? What method will we use? Here it is:

Define Your Goal

Your goal is the most important thing here. Have you set your goal? That goal should be clear and challenging. Use the simple “How Might We” statements to describe it. In this process, you also should define your targets. These are several examples:

How might we cut customer waiting time in our coffee shop? How might we give a new online payment experience for our users? How might we disinfect the whole hotel area from any virus?

Note your defined goal and use it as your reference for the next steps.

Gather Information

There are several things that maybe your team doesn’t know exactly. It makes collaboration doesn’t stand in the same phase. Let’s resonance that. Your group can do those things bellow:

Process map. It’s necessary to understand how things happened actually. So it a must for us to show the existing process to the team members. I’ll explain it later in another post. But for now, just do it! Empathize. It is essential to feel what the user feels, especially when we want to create a solution for our customers. It can be done by observing our target or interviewing them. Ask the expert. It can help you to evaluate your process map or even gives you another insight into your target. The expert can be anybody who knows the condition; it can be a manager, professor, or even cleaning service.

Let’s Brainstorm the Ideas: Ideation

Let start! The standard method is when we use sticky notes and put all the opinions there. But we can try another way to make your brain pull out all their knowledge.

Cost-Benefit Chart

Bundle Ideas. Prepare your sticky notes and get ready to put all your idea in each of them. Arrange all your team results on the board. You can choose the most meaningful and less costly choice, using the cost-benefit chart. Analogous inspiration, to get a fresh perspective on your research, shift your focus to a new context from existing products. Write your findings of distinct activities, behaviours, and emotions and then think about the event that relates to ours (the parallel situation). For example, you want to make a solution that makes our body-exercise habit stronger; you might find an alarm application that might have a similar user experience.

Prototype it!

This process aims to give us excellent learning insight. This process lets us know is our solution is fit to the target and decide what should be improved. The key to do this is: fake it or make it.