Ideation Techniques are a great way to generate a good quantity and quality of ideas that can help improve different aspects of a brand. According to An Introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide, “Ideation is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides both the fuel and also the source material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the hands of your users.” This truly shows how important it is when it comes to creating ideas and eventually building on them. I was able to take point-of-view statements created for Instagram, Uber, and Dunkin and used 12 different techniques to improve on the ideas.
One of the most useful ideation techniques is when you rapid-fire ideas out. This can be found in Brainwriting, Worst Possible Idea, Gamestorming, Braindump, Bodystorm, and many other of the techniques. These are super useful, no matter if the ideas are good or bad or postive nor negative, as it just gives you the ability to release the ideas out of your head. From there, you can tweak them and make them more suitable for the specific concept. Psych Central says, “Proponents of brain dumping say that its benefits include: helping you remember what you need to accomplish each day, clearing up headspace to learn more information, organizing your thoughts, improving focus and concentration, increasing self-awareness of thoughts and feelings, may decrease stress.” These are all very beneficial when creating ideas.
In addition, being able to take ideas from other successful products, like in Analogies, was very useful and personally worked well for me. Being able to see what brands like Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon do and translating it back is really practical. I did this for Dunkin in my example and was able to realize that they could personalize promotions and offers on the home screen like Spotify and Netflix do, giving users the option to “Order your usual” like Amazon, and reward customers for frequently getting drinks/food from them as many airlines’ loyalty programs do.
All in all, using ideation techniques is very valuable when trying to develop and improve on design ideas. As Interaction Design Foundation put it, “There are literally hundreds of ideation techniques. Here we’ve provided you with an overview of the best techniques as well as when and why to use them. Due to the nature of ideation, it is extremely important to make use of techniques that match the type of ideas you’re trying to generate.” After going through all 21 concepts, they are super practical and make it easy to create quality concepts.
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