Week 3 Generating Ideas, Now that you have spent some time uncovering

Third week: Generating Ideas / Design Brief

Now that you have spent some time uncovering opportunities in the grocery store, it’s your turn to generate solutions. We recommend that you flex your leadership skills by assembling a small team of 2-3 people to help with this. For this peer review assignment, you should expect to spend 20 minutes preparing to generate concepts, one hour generating, and 40 minutes creating a storyboard.

1. Now that you have spent some time uncovering opportunities in the grocery store, it’s your turn to generate solutions. This is where all of the hard work in research starts to pay off. Part of generating ideas is the process of finding the most fruitful area to design in. This is an ongoing process and not just something that you have to decide once and stick with. As you generate ideas, question the assumptions you’ve made and feel free to reframe your HMW statements! Just make sure that they are always in service of the user and the insights that you uncovered from research.

Remember that at this stage in the process, we are going for quantity not quality. You should generate a lot of ideas. It might be difficult at first, but the more you do it, the easier it becomes. If you feel uninspired by a HMW statement that you’ve generated, revise it or choose another one altogether.

Expect to spend 20 minutes preparing to generate concepts, one hour generating and 40 minutes creating a storyboard.

Reflect on the three HMW (How Might We) statements you generated as the outcome of the last module. Which one of those statements gets you excited to generate concepts? Which has lost its appeal? Spend a minute selecting the most compelling HMW statement until you arrive one that you feel very good about. YOU CAN COMBINE, SWAP, REVISE, REJECT AND REWORK THE HMW STATEMENTS YOU PREVIOUSLY GENERATED. It’s more than acceptable to update your HMW statements based on new thinking, just be sure that they continue to reflect the insights that you uncovered from the observations you made. The goal is to serve the user, so always keep that in mind as you move forward and constantly check back to what you initially observed.

Please provide the one How Might We statement you will be working off of now and a brief one to two sentence reflection on why you chose it. Be sure to include any changes, new thinking, or challenges involved in selecting your HMW statements.

2. Now that you have selected one How Might We statement, you’re ready to begin brainstorming. For the purpose of this exercise, we recommend that you gather together a few friends or colleagues to help you out-- a chance to flex your leadership skills! If that's not an option, you can solostorm, which simply means you’ll be brainstorming on your own, though you may find it much more difficult without the energy and ideas of others to feed off of. Find a place where you feel comfortable and can spread out, and collect any supplies you might need (Post-It Notes, markers, half-sheets, etc.). Get everyone warmed up with some laughter, music, and maybe snacks. Spend at least 10 minutes generating 15 concepts for the HMW statement that you have selected. Go for quantity over quality and for a range of ideas. The ideas don’t have to be fully developed. Capture big ideas, small ideas and any in between. Don’t waste time pouring over the details and don’t judge your ideas. Allow yourself to think divergently and capture wild ideas. Quickly sketch the essence of the idea and fill in any gaps with notes. You shouldn’t spend more than one minute on each concept! Post a photo of all your concepts (at least 15 in total), making sure that each is a simple sketch and a few words describing it. Please place all of your sketches and notes into one file before you upload it.

3. Take a moment and look at the ideas you’ve just generated. There should be a lot of them. Do the ideas reflect a broad range of thinking? Are there some that seem implausible but sound amazing? Do all of your ideas look the same? Did you get stuck in the details? Are some big changes? Are some small? Now that you’ve taken a moment to reflect, fill in some of the gaps. If all of the ideas you generated are products, try to think of services that could meet your HMW statement. We often use questions to reframe our thinking and challenge ourselves to push further in concept generation. What if it had to fit inside of a shoebox? What if we had to do it without any electricity? What if we had to spend at least one million dollars? What would make this experience even worse for users? What if Google designed the grocery store? Based on what is missing from your concepts, create challenges for yourself. List two challenge questions that you would like to focus on.

4. Spend 5 minutes generating concepts based on your 2 challenge questions. Upload at least 3 new concepts for each of the two challenge questions based in the form of sketches and notes (you should have at least 6 sketches/notes in total). Please place all of your sketches and notes into one file before you upload it. Be sure that it is clear for the reviewer which sketches and descriptions go with each of the challenge questions.

5. Take a step back and look at what you & your team have created. You should now have a broad range of solutions and a lot of ideas. Some might be silly, others really compelling, but overall you have just generated your first set of concepts. Congratulations! Feel free to add to this set at any point in the design process. If you wake up in the middle of the night with an AHA! moment, add the concept to your set. Now take a moment to organize what you’ve just generated. Do some of the concepts seem to work together? Are some of them similar enough to be combined into one? Do some feel like small parts of a larger idea? Physically group the ideas together and move them around. DON’T REMOVE ANY! Upload a picture of your reorganized concepts and write a short description for of any concepts that you combined or grouped together. Please place all of your sketches and notes into one file before you upload it. Be sure that it is clear for the reviewer which sketches and descriptions go with each of the concepts.

6. Choose one concept that you find most compelling. Create a storyboard for that concept. Begin to consider how that concept fits into the larger context. How do people become aware of it? How do people use it? Now is the time to begin thinking about some of the details. Refer to Video 3 on how to create a storyboard. Small sheets of paper or square sticky notes work well for this-- it's not art, it's just rapid visualizations of the user experience. Remember that each sheet should contain one “scene” and that you can rearrange and reorder the sheets as you go. You can also swap “scenes” or remove them entirely. The drawings should be as simple as possible and you should use notes to augment the drawings. The user should be the focus of the story. Please upload your completed storyboard as single file.