Ltap Research: Brainstorm

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Wednesday, August 9, 2017

A Designer’s Guide To Brainstorms That Are Actually Useful

Rule No. 1: Always say “yes.”

[Illustration: Rogotanie/iStock]

BY ELI WOOLERY9 MINUTE READ

The Apollo 13 Mission Control team faced a huge number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles after an oxygen tank exploded on board the 1970 mission to the moon. They needed to find a new route that would get the astronauts back to Earth quickly with a limited supply of life-supporting fuel and power.

The most pressing problem was a buildup of carbon dioxide in the ship. Without a replacement scrubber, stored out of reach in a different module in the craft, the crew would soon asphyxiate from their own exhalations.

[Source Images: Rogotanie/iStock (patterns), Picsfive/iStock (texture)]

In the 1995 movie version of this dramatic event, Apollo 13, Flight Director Gene Kranz (played by Ed Harris) assembles the top engineers and scientists in a room for a brainstorming session. He tells the group to forget the flight plan, and that they would be “improvising a new mission.” Standing in front of a chalkboard, he quickly sketches the original route of the ship. Then, when one of the engineers suggests a new route, Kranz alters the original route to show a slingshot approach that would use the moon’s gravity to whip the astronauts back toward Earth.
In a later scene, a group of engineers tasked with devising a new filtration system dumps the same items aboard Apollo 13 onto a table. They proceed to prototype a fix that the crew can build from the objects at hand, ending up with a literal “duct-tape solution.”

In each case, the route to resolving the problems seemed relatively straightforward, if fraught with urgency: get a bunch of smart people in a room, and have them collectively come up with ideas until the best solution was found. We can assume that the film was faithful to what happened in the real life control room in Houston, but what conditions created such a successful environment for brainstorming?

The term “brainstorm” was popularized by the ad agency executive Alex Osborn in his 1953 book Applied Imagination (though he had outlined his method in a 1948 book, Your Creative Power). Osborn claimed that by organizing a group to attack a creative problem “commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective,” creative output could be doubled.

Osborn created two main rules for a successful brainstorm:

Defer judgement
Reach for quantity

Deferring judgment reduces social inhibitions in the group—no one would be stigmatized for shouting out a crazy idea. By reaching for quantity, participants would boost their overall creative output and increase the likelihood of coming up with innovative solutions.

Brainstorming in a group might not work as well for original ideas, as compared to individuals working independently. However, brainstorming adds value to the creative process in ways that don’t just involve coming up with ideas.

BRAINSTORMING ISN’T ABOUT NEW IDEAS, REALLY

It turns out that the power of brainstorming doesn’t really come from spontaneously generating new ideas. Rather, the real strength in brainstorming stems from the process’s ability to:

Quickly generate lots of ideas, to help get an overview of the conceptual landscape. These are not necessarily new ideas (or good ideas). They may have been brewing for a while as individuals considered the problem beforehand. These ideas can become the seeds for solutions, to be investigated with prototypes. [The] goal is to give you a mass quantity of ideas quickly . . . not solutions, but the seeds to possible solutions. Solutions take real hard work. Brainstorming gets you the lay of the land quickly for possible solution areas to investigate. But good solutions are like body building, there’s no way to cheat the hours of the gym you got to put in,” says Art Sandoval, vice president of engineering at LUNAR Design.
Gather a team into a physical space where they can share perspectives on the problem and are all aware of the potential solution spaces as they are surfaced. Done well, it can energize a team (and done poorly, it can deflate one).
Get clients or stakeholders to buy into the design process, and also learn what is important to these decision makers. “[Brainstorms are] excellent at helping clients buy into the creative process…they get to join in on the brainstorms, they see lots of ideas, they get to vote for their favorites and a dialogue happens during the voting process that is crucial,” says Yona Belfort, product designer at Vital Innovation. “Some kind of sorting always follows a brainstorm, and it’s during this process that one can learn from the client. What have they already done or are currently doing? What can’t they do? Won’t they do? And most importantly, what are they excited about?”

Generating ideas, sharing perspectives, and gaining stakeholder buy-in are lofty goals. To achieve them with brainstorming requires careful planning. In the next few sections, we’ll cover how to properly set the stage for success.

BEFORE THE BRAINSTORM

A key part of the brainstorming process is the facilitator—someone who will lead the session, keep track of time, and set up the space for the group. This facilitator can also make sure that the group comes prepared with a mission framed by problem statements.

SET A MISSION

Your brainstorming session should have a clear goal. What problem(s) are you surfacing ideas for? What is the best method for coming up with this goal?

Stanford’s d.school design thinking framework alternates between generative (flaring) and selective (focusing) phases. As you empathize, you gather data and stories from your users, generating insights and flaring out. As you begin to synthesize that information and come closer to defining your point of view, you become selective about the solution space you will pursue, and you focus.

In the ideate phase, you flare out again as you generate a multitude of ideas and select promising solutions for prototyping. Doing this helps your team step beyond obvious solutions, harness the collective creativity of the team, and discover new and unexpected areas to explore.

How do you go about generating those ideas? The POV that you generated in the define phase is a great platform to help start the process. Using your POV problem statement, come up with “How might we … ?” topics that are subsets of the entire problem. If your POV is well constructed, these topics should fall naturally out of it.

SET UP THE SPACE

For a good brainstorm to happen, the energy in the room needs to be right. First, pick a space that has large whiteboards or room on a wall to set up poster-sized Easel Pads. The room should also be somewhat enclosed if there is a worry about bothering other teams (brainstorming can get boisterous)—but there are alternate techniques for a quiet brainstorm, which we’ll get to a little later.

GET INTO THE RIGHT HEADSPACE

If you’re coming into a brainstorming session from individual work, it can be a little jarring to adopt a collaborative mindset—and hard to ramp up your energy level accordingly. The facilitator should spend a few minutes getting everyone acclimated. There are quick, improv-based techniques for this, like Sound Ball or Knife, Baby, and Angry Cat.

LIMIT THE TIME

A brainstorm can quickly run out of steam if the facilitator doesn’t establish time limits and keep the conversation moving. Setting a time limit for each topic is a good idea (15 to 20 minutes works well, depending on how many topics you need to cover). You can also set a goal for the number of ideas per topic (e.g., 100 ideas in 20 minutes). Use a Time Timer so everyone has a visual indicator and to benefits from adrenaline-powered sprints as the time begins to run short.

During the brainstorm

When the brainstorm kicks off, the moderator’s job is to keep the momentum going, stay on topic, and make sure all ideas are captured.

ALWAYS SAY YES

To keep the energy high and the ideas flowing, a good brainstorm shares a lot in common with the improv technique of “Yes, and . . .” When an idea is put forth, participants should be encouraged to build on it, putting a positive spin on the contribution. Critical energy can be diverted into productive ideation in this way. For example, “Yes, I like that idea, and we could go even further by . . .”

STAY ON TOPIC

In the heated environment of a brainstorm, it’s easy to get sidetracked and start diving down rabbit holes that have no relation to the problem statement at hand. It’s important for the facilitator to gently guide participants back to the current topic. Sometimes this is best done by noting adjacent topics and mentioning that the group can come back to it later or during a future session.

BE VISUAL AND HEADLINE

One way to run a brainstorm is to have the facilitator serve as scribe, logging all the ideas as they come. Another is to arm the group with sticky notes and sharpies, so that they can walk up to the board, verbally share an idea, and put a summary of the idea on the board.

Either way, it’s important to be visual. Encourage quick sketches—these will help to clarify and group ideas.

Also, ideas should be headlined as they are produced. A participant can say, “We could create a way for the user to leave feedback for us directly via a comment form,” which someone would then summarize as “Feedback comment form.”

Whatever method you choose, ideas should be shared one at a time. This allows the scribe to write them, or the participant to be heard as they post their idea to the board.

AFTER THE BRAINSTORM

When the brainstorm is finished and there are a hundred ideas on the board, it’s easy enough to give high fives all around and walk away without really having accomplished much. Leave a little time after the brainstorm to review and capture the ideas that were shared.

NARROW DOWN, BUT NOT TOO FAST

If you’ve run a productive brainstorm, you’ll likely have a lot of different ideas on the board—some funny, some weird, perhaps some verging on insane. It can be tempting to cut any idea that isn’t feasible, but by doing so you may be tripping up the ideation process. Sometimes good ideas can come from a place that initially seemed silly.

Instead, give the participants a way to select ideas across multiple criteria. One way to do this is to use color-coded sticky dots or pieces of colored Post-its. Each color can signify a person’s top choices in each category, such as the lowest hanging fruit, most delightful, or the long shot.

CAPTURE AND MOVE TO PROTOTYPING

Once you’ve selected ideas in each category, carry them into prototyping, ensuring that you don’t walk away from the session with just the safest choice. Use a phone to photograph the whole board, and then extract the top ideas in a document which can be used to kick off the prototyping process (Google Docs is great for this).

Prototyping is a flaring part of the design thinking process. Even if a selected idea is so crazy it doesn’t seem worthy of a test, figure out what’s attractive in that solution, and use that to inspire a prototype. The goal is to come into the prototype phase with multiple solutions to build and then test.

Remember that brainstorming is just one step in the process of coming up with a solution. In all likelihood, you won’t come out of a brainstorming session armed with the exact idea that you’ll bring to your users. But you will hopefully compile an overview of the conceptual landscape, gain a shared perspective on the problem with your team, or get key stakeholders to buy into the design process. All of these things will help seed the minds of your team.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

"Note And Vote": How Google Ventures Avoids Groupthink In Meetings

MEETINGS WANT TO SUCK. WREST CONTROL OF THEM WITH THIS SEVEN-STEP STRATEGY.

WRITTEN BY Jake Knapp

You know when a meeting turns into a complete waste of time? Maybe you’re trying to come up with ideas, or make a decision. Before anyone realizes it, the meeting starts to suck.

Meetings want to suck. Two of their favorite suckiness tactics are group brainstorming and group negotiation. Give them half a chance, and they’ll waste your time, sap your energy, and leave you with poor ideas and a watered-down decision. But meetings don't have to be that way.

On the Google Ventures design team, we dislike sucky meetings as much as anyone. We use a process hack that short-circuits the worst parts of groupthink while getting the most out of different perspectives. For lack of a better name, we call it the “note-and-vote.”

The next time you need to make a decision or come up with a new idea in a group, call timeout and give the note-and-vote a try.

HOW IT WORKS

1. Note

Distribute paper and pens to each person. Set a timer for five minutes to 10 minutes. Everyone writes down as many ideas as they can. Individually. Quietly. This list won’t be shared with the group, so nobody has to worry about writing down dumb ideas.

2. Self-edit

Set the timer for two minutes. Each person reviews his or her own list and picks one or two favorites. Individually. Quietly.

3. Share and capture

One at a time, each person shares his or her top idea(s). No sales pitch. Just say what you wrote and move on. As you go, one person writes everybody’s ideas on the whiteboard.

4. Vote

Set the timer for five minutes. Each person chooses a favorite from the ideas on the whiteboard. Individually. Quietly. You must commit your vote to paper.

5. Share and capture

One at a time, each person says their vote. A short sales pitch may be permissible, but no changing your vote! Say what you wrote. Write the votes on the whiteboard. Dots work well.

6. Decide

Who is the decider? She should make the final call--not the group. She can choose to respect the votes or not. This is less awkward than it sounds: instead of dancing around people’s opinions and feelings, you’ve made the mechanics plain. Everyone’s voice was heard.

7. Rejoice. That only took 15 minutes!

The note-and-vote isn’t perfect (remember, I said “pretty good decisions”). But it is fast. And it’s quite likely better than what you’d get with two hours of the old way.

You might want to adapt the specifics to suit the problem and your team. Sometimes multiple votes per person are helpful. Sometimes sales pitches give crucial insight. We often jump right to voting when there's a finite list of options. So long as you do most of the thinking individually, you’ll see a big efficiency boost.

WHY IT WORKS

Quiet time to think

Meetings rarely offer individuals time to focus and think. Group brainstorms--where everyone shouts out ideas and builds off one another--can be fun, but in my experience, the strongest ideas always come from individuals.

Parallel is better than serial

Normal meetings are serial. In other words, one person is talking at a time, and someone is always talking. That means there’s one thread of thought for the length of the meeting. Parallel work increases your bandwidth. More solutions are considered and evaluated.

Voting commitment

Writing down your vote ensures that you won’t be swayed when someone else you respect votes for something else. This is a social hack--we naturally want to make other people feel good and form consensus in meetings. Conflict is useful.

We’ve used the note-and-vote for everything from naming companies to choosing product features, and from setting a meeting agenda to picking a restaurant for lunch. If you try it, let me know how it goes--drop me a tweet @jakek.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

The Manager's One-Minute Guide To Brainstorming Apps

It’s foolish to assume you “know” what kind of app your company needs built. To find out, ask yourself these questions first.

By Sven Lenaerts

The most misunderstood axiom about technology among management is that building a successful digital product begins with the utility value. It doesn’t require impressive branding, exquisite design, or a polished user experience, so those things should be left for last. Start with utility value and proceed from there.

As Jon Lax, cofounder of the digital agency Teehan+Lax told me: “Think about how many apps you download. You use them for two or three times and believe that they are really beautiful and well-designed. Next, you never use them again.”

First Define The Scope

Utility value answers the question: What does your product offer? Defining your utility value is not usually straightforward. Lax points me to the "Jobs to be Done" framework by Harvard Business School’s Clay Christensen.

Christensen focuses on the principle that we “hire” certain products and services to solve our problems. That’s a great perspective to define the utility value of a digital product: Look for the same qualities in that product that you’d look for in a human being doing the same job.

“Very often clients come in saying they know their problem and they know their solution,” says Lax. This is rarely the case, however. As you work on the problem you’re attempting to solve, often your perspective changes. You learn to understand what the problem encompasses, including related or ancillary problems. This is called the “scope” of the problem, and it’s often larger than you think.

Clarifying the scope of the problem is a matter of questioning clients and the audience that experiences the problem. By having a lengthy conversation about why it is experienced as a problem you learn that a user has certain needs you need to fulfill. Successful digital products dive deeper into the problem and discover needs which aren’t necessarily obvious when you first encounter what frustrates people.

Next, Put "Jobs to be Done" Into Practice

Lax says once you’ve defined the scope of the problem, you can move onto core functionality. This involves reducing the purpose of the app to just one or two “main tasks.”

“First we try to understand what job this product will be doing and what the core features are. That’s your minimum viable product,” he says.

Rather than be restrictive during the MVP process, be expansive--then whittle down your ideas to the absolute necessities.

“What are the 500 features that we potentially see a product [having]?” says Lax. “Of course, that’s unreasonable as you could be working on a product for five years. What are the 10-15 that are the most important and solve the problem?”

This doesn’t necessarily mean limiting the ambition of your app. “There are products which I wouldn’t call simple but they do what they do very well. Look at Google Analytics,” says Lax.

And forget about being a knee-jerk minimalist, too. “There’s too much emphasis on that something which is gorgeous and simple will win. That’s not true. That’s not winning at all. I believe that you win when you create something that is valuable enough for a large enough market that uses your product on a regular basis and gives you the opportunity to build a business around it. Everything else is just noise,” says Lax.

Then Shift Focus To Usability

Besides defining the utility value, usability also comes into play when creating digital products. Utility is what you offer, usability is how you offer it. In usability, there are three major principles to make sure your value offering is optimal.

Frequency: Prioritize what appears in your interfaces. Think about what users need frequently, then make those tasks easily accessible and blatantly visible on the page.
Sequence: Your UI needs a sensible order of actions. For example, you enter your credit card information at the end of an e-commerce flow, not when you initially land on the website.
Importance: What tasks or controls in the interface offer the most value? Design the UI around those tasks.

This is like socializing your app, says Lax. “Essentially, raise the product like a child.”

Applying This Process To Extant Products

All of this makes a lot of sense for new products as you have the advantage of a clean slate, which has its pros and cons. What about old products or projects?

“Legacy is harder to deal with--you have to take more things into consideration. You have a lot more data to operate on, but that data might become limiting because you have all that legacy you need to continue to support,” says Lax.

An example could be trying to make a product more accessible for a larger market. “Which users are we helping at the cost of other ones? There will be training wheels in the product. It’s like switching from Final Cut Pro to iMovie. You can’t make something work for everyone.”

As you work on existing products, there’s always an ongoing struggle. “You don’t want to alienate the core audience. It requires discipline and bravery to take that risk.” It’s always a matter of making intelligent compromises to improve a product.

In conclusion, utility value is a useful starting point to get yourself on the right track. It’s not necessarily about having a good idea, but rather about solving the right problem.

“I look at a lot of work in the digital channel as being work which has the purpose of creating demand. Their job is trying to engage you long enough to sell something,” says Lax.

“On the other hand, there are products you hire to do something for you. It’s the utilitarian value. Our tolerance for products simply selling something will become less and less. We want to give our attention only to products which will be solving problems in our lives,” he says.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Google Ventures: Your Design Team Needs A War Room. Here's How To Set One Up

WANT TO FOSTER CREATIVITY? SKIP THE FOOSBALL TABLE AND OPT FOR A WAR ROOM INSTEAD. GOOGLE VENTURES'S JAKE KNAPP SHOWS YOU HOW. PLUS: A PEEK INSIDE GOOGLE VENTURES'S OWN WAR ROOM

WRITTEN BY Jake Knapp

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3028471/google-ventures-your-design-team-needs-a-war-room-heres-how-to-set-one-up?partner=newsletter

In the last two years at Google Ventures, I’ve done design sprints with more than 80 startups. One of the simplest tricks I’ve learned is that a dedicated space with walls--a war room--always helps us do better work. The walls of a war room can extend a team’s memory, provide a canvas for shared note-taking, and act as long-term storage for works in progress.

Unfortunately, war rooms are few and far between. I’m surprised by how many tech companies make space for a foosball table (fun but seldom used), yet don't dedicate a room to their most important project.

If your team doesn’t have a war room, don’t worry. In this post, I’ll explain how to put one together on almost any budget. Spoiler: while a dedicated physical space is great to have, it’s not an absolute necessity. But first, here’s a bit more on why war rooms work so well.

SPATIAL MEMORY > SHORT-TERM MEMORY

To solve a complex design problem, you need to track lots of moving parts. As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good--but our spatial memory isawesome. Plaster a room with notes and you take advantage of that spatial memory. You begin to know where information is, which extends your ability to remember things.

PHYSICAL IDEAS ARE EASIER TO MANIPULATE

We all know it’s better to re-order a prioritized list of sticky notes or re-draw a diagram than to make the same decisions verbally. That’s why there are whiteboards in meeting rooms and why people love agile trackers with sticky notes. War rooms take those tools to the next level.

WAR ROOMS BUILD SHARED UNDERSTANDING

War rooms help your team work better together. When you capture every decision and put it on the wall, you don’t have to wonder if everyone is on the same page. The room is the page. The more you put on the walls, the more shared understanding you build. As a bonus, you spend less time revisiting already-discussed issues. A war room works great for long-term projects of a few days or a few weeks--and it also works great for one-off meetings.

INGREDIENTS OF A GREAT WAR ROOM

LOTS OF SURFACE AREA

In a Google Ventures design sprint, it’s common to have many things on the walls at once: user story diagrams, research notes, printouts of the existing UI, sketches of possible solutions, a detailed storyboard, and sometimes more. To accommodate all that stuff, you need a lot of space. That means whiteboards, windows, and empty walls where you can stick stuff.

Every bit of window, wall, and whiteboard is useful.

DEDICATED TO PROJECTS (NOT MEETINGS)

You don’t want your war room turning into just another conference room. For best results, remove your war room from your company’s room-scheduling calendar.

AS MANY WHITEBOARDS AS YOU CAN FIT

Whiteboards come in a lot of styles, so choose wisely.

Floor-to-ceiling wall-mounted--The best. I like to use every square inch of available space, and with these babies, that’s a lot of space.
IdeaPaint--Great stuff (unless your walls have a funky texture). And for goodness sake, paint all the walls, otherwise, get ready to have somebody write “Not a whiteboard!” in whiteboard marker on the unpainted walls.
Normal wall-mounted--These are okay if you get more than one.
D.I.Y. shower board whiteboards--Much cheaper than real whiteboards, these require more elbow grease to install (you may spill Liquid Nails on your designer-y plaid shirt). The surface isn’t quite as good, so expect to clean it more often.
Rolling--These come in small and giant sizes. The small ones have a lot of unusable space down by the floor, and they shake when you draw on them. The giant ones cost a lot more, but they’re actually usable.

FLEXIBLE FURNITURE

In our design sprints, we go through a lot of different work modes. Sometimes we need to talk a lot, and we want chairs and open space. Other times, we’re drawing on paper and we want desks. The ideal war room has furniture that’s lightweight or on wheels, so it’s easy to move.

Everything is lightweight, on wheels, or both.

You should always have at least one person wearing plaid--three or more if possible.

THREE WAR ROOM RECIPES

1. GOOGLE VENTURES DESIGN WAR ROOM

We took over a conference room and removed the big table in the middle. Next, we installed as many whiteboards as we could. We couldn’t do floor-to-ceiling, but we got close.

Finally we ordered a bunch of flexible furniture--some of it fancy-pants (like Modernica chairs) and some utilitarian (like clipboards and a coat hanger). Here’s thecomplete shopping list hand-picked by Google Ventures’ Daniel Burka. Some highlights:

Rolling desks (CB2)--$150 each
Stackable chairs (Office Depot)--$410 for four
Rolling whiteboard (Amazon)--$550

2. RECONFIGURABLE CONFERENCE ROOM

It may be impossible to completely take over a room. If you have to share your war room, get some portable wall space that you can assemble and disassemble quickly. Your options:

Sticky flip charts--Blank sheets of this stuff make a reusable, moveable backdrop for sticky notes and printouts.
Giant foam core--Foam core comes in 96”x48” but it’s expensive and tricky to find, not to mention cumbersome. Which is why I prefer...
Rolling whiteboards--see above for our favorite.

3. NO-ROOM WAR ROOM

Sometimes you don’t even have a conference room to commandeer. I’ve seen this challenge at startups in incubators or shared offices. Don’t freak out. You can still make a war room by hacking the space around your desk. Use rolling whiteboards as partitions. It’s just like you’re a kid again, building a fort out of chairs and blankets! But don’t actually use blankets, because your co-workers might get creeped out.