Hello and welcome back. Today, we'll be talking about idea selection. So if you followed the ideation video, at this point you may have hundreds of ideas scattered on post-it notes or white boards or in sketches or in documents somewhere. So how do you go through all these ideas and actually decide which ideas to pursue? So I'm going to share one possible process and this process really does benefit from going through this with a team of people but it could be potentially by somebody on their own as well. So here's the general overview. So first you're going to call and combine ideas. You're going to cluster some of them. You're going to name and describe each idea and perhaps even sketch if you have the opportunity. You're going to rate the ideas based on either your implications for design, or your design requirements, or your personas or however you have formulated your formative data. And then you're going to combine those ratings, discuss, and choose. The example that I'm going to use in this is an example I frequently use with my class where we had brainstormed kind of social footwear. The idea of putting technology in shoes or on shoes and seeing how that could improve people's lives. So it's kind of a silly idea, but it really usually leads to a wide variety of interesting ideas and that's why I use it. And when I kind of go through this process cull and combine clustering I'm really kind of aiming for something like seven clusters maybe. Definitely no more than ten I think it's hard to really articulate more ideas than that. And probably not less than three because that's not enough ideas for a rich discussion. So somewhere between three and ten maybe and seven is frequently the number we end up with. So as we go through your idea selection, how do you cull and combine. The first thing is that since you weren't at all judging during your brainstorming process, or at least you weren't supposed to judge during the ideation process, you may actually have two ideas that are essentially identical. So for example, in the class when we did the shoe brainstorming the idea of a screen being on a shoe, the idea of being able to project information on the shoe is really kind of identical. I mean, there may be kind of different assumptions of technology, but what it does is the same. Somehow, information appears on your shoe. So in fact, those two ideas, you can just pick one of those and keep that one and discard the other. You can remove all ideas that are unrelated to the project topic. So for example again, because we weren't in the process of brainstorming people may have come up with some creative ideas for shoes that had nothing to with this idea of social or technology may just have been like cool shoes with heels that look like the starship enterprise. Well that's cool but it doesn't have anything to do with technology and it doesn't have anything to do with social. And so all those ideas can be removed from the list and don't have to be included in the consideration. So just going through those two steps, frequently your list can be cut down by half. So when you started out with your 500 ideas or your 100 ideas, at this point you might only have 50 left or 250 left. You can also abstract ideas that are very similar in function. So for example three ideas that we came up in a brainstorming, where shoes that vibrate when you're friend is close, shoes that light up when your friend is near, and shoes that get warmer when near a friend. So all of these are really getting of the same concepts. So shoes indicate proximity to friends through sensory feedback. And so all of them can kind of be obstructive and combine into a single idea. Now the next step is clustering. So you can use something like affinity diagram, an affinity mapping, mind mapping to cluster the remaining ideas. And I really prefer to cluster based on what the idea does. Now if you need a reminder of how to cluster this is actually very similar to the process taken in qualitative analysis so take a look at the qualitative analysis video for kind of the exact steps of doing this. But from the shoe example you might end up with kind of four categories so let's say a shoe that delivers navigational information somehow. A shoe that delivers, that sends sensory experiences to a friend. Shoes that respond to proximity of a friend. So that may include this idea of shoes that indicate proximity to friends through sensory feedback but may have also other ways that those shoes indicate proximity to a friend. Shoes that help teach specific skills, whether that's driving, or dancing, or running, or whatever it is. And in addition to kind of the major clusters of ideas, I also like retaining kind of unique or promising, what I call, orphans. So ideas that may not be part of a cluster, but that are kind of interesting, and different, and are relevant. So perhaps shoes that provide feedback in a social game. We may have only had one idea that kind of got at that concept. But if it was interesting enough, we still need one to retain it. So the next thing you do once you arrive at your clusters. And as I said, somewhere between three and ten is probably the right number. You want to name and describe examples. So for example maybe the name of this idea is visual friend proximity. You may even sketch it out, so this kind of like, so this American shoe called the Croc, that kind of took the country by storm for awhile, and kids would frequently decorate them with these little kind of add on objects, kind of like pins. And so maybe the idea is that each toy on this Croc represents a trade with a friend, and then it glows when that particular friend is nearby. So we've named this example which is visual friend proximity, you've provided an image, that's optional but it's very nice if you do. And we've kind of describe that in a single sentence so somebody could understand what that idea is. And then, the next step is really rating this idea and other ideas that you may have based on your either your implications for design or your design requirements or your personas or however you actually articulate and then formalize the findings of your formative study. So for example maybe in your formative study from interviewing people about opportunities for social photo or observing people. You may have found four implications for design, such as encourage physical activity, so you could have to be physically active. They protect the user's privacy. They support personalization, and they leverage this like urge to collect. So, people frequently want to catch them all, whether it's Pokemon or pins or badges or whatever it is. So if those are your four applications for designs you may ask each member of your team to read each ideas scale of one to five base on how much it actually serve builds on that idea or contributes that idea or response to that particular implication. So for example lots of people here may have thought that this is not that great for active use because this traded pins will glow no matter what. But it's very good at leveraging this idea of collectables. And it's pretty good at leveraging this idea of personalization. Like you can really pick the pins and decide which pens to trade. And in terms of privacy, it's kind of in the middle, maybe you don't want your location shared with your friend just because you've exchanged a pin. So it might violate the privacy of some, but maybe other people would be okay with that. So in essence, each of these ideas is now kind of considered upon all of these dimensions. And you do maybe want to kind of restate or refine whether it's your implications or your personas or potentially even rank them based on their relative importance before you go through this process, because it can actually really help you quantify which things are important and how this particular idea performs on all of these requirements. Now the next part is kind of subjective. The process of combining ratings or discussing or choosing most promising ideas is really up to you. You may just average those rating scores on the different criteria maybe that will lead you to a good response. Or maybe you include another round of voting by team members after kind of conducting this discussion where all these design requirements or personas are really considered. So That voting process doesn't need to be sort of one idea per person, in fact what I find to be one of the most helpful ways of doing this is by giving each person multiple points to distribute among ideas. So let's say you tell each member of your team that they have ten votes and they can place them however they want Among their ideas are available. So for example if that particular member of your team feels really strongly but one particular idea, that's the best way to go. They may actually put all ten of their votes on that particular idea. Now it could also be that there's three ideas in your kind if you could whispered between them. So don't give each one of those three votes for example. And one of the ways that I operationalize this frequently is with post-it notes, so here's for an example an example of where I had students, the ideas were pinned up, and students were voting by just placing their post-it notes on particular ideas. It's very visual, it's very easy to see how many votes a particular idea is getting, and it also helps people make their decisions about how to place their votes. So hopefully through that process, you actually arrive at the ideas that seem most promising, or at least ones that you now want to communicate to stakeholders, to users, or to maybe your manager. Or whoever actually gets to kind of figure out what are the next steps, or continue providing you with feedback on what the next steps might be. So typically what designers do next to these steps is figuring out specific alternatives. Maybe you've decided that yes, visual proximity to friends is the way you want to go with shoes. But now you actually need to figure out how that visual proximity will be determined. So you might actually go through another process of brainstorming and refining. So for example the study I often use is the idea of the share table system that connects parents and kids. So once we decided we wanted to use a camera projector system from the first set of brainstormed ideas. Now we went through a whole entire process to try to figure out well what is that camera projector system going to look like. Is it going to be a table lamp? Is it going to be a box? Is it going to be a tent? Is it going to be a cabinet? What is it going to be? Sketching and storyboarding is really valuable here. There's a video you can watch on communicating diverse ideas to stay were really sort of advocate for sketching as a good way of expressing ideas. Critiquing and refining ideas, whether you are doing this with stakeholders, participants, or whether your doing this within your team, or perhaps with the manager. It can be a really valuable process to actually get to the core of what makes an idea good or perhaps take out some of the negatives of an idea. And lastly, I hope ideally everybody does this at this stage before they decide on the final idea to pursue. Actually getting user feedback. So at this point your ideas are probably expressed as a single paragraph or as a single sketch or drawing and so it's really easy to actually take that to some users and say here's what we were thinking. Do you think this would work for you? Because if something doesn't work for them something's really going to conflict with the way they live their lives. You want to find out about this when you've committed 15 minutes of sketching something not when you've committed five years to building some new piece of technology. And so yes the more you get user feedback the more you manage your risk. And so that's something I definitely recommend you do. So hopefully this video provided you with some insight in how to actually go from a set of 500 or 5,000 or 100 ideas or whatever it is down to a more manageable and concrete set of ideas that you may pursue in your designs. And I will see you in the next video.
