SPEAKER: The ideation
phase is where we transition from learning
about users and the problem to coming up with solutions. Let's start by discussing
what ideation means. As you might have
guessed, the term ideation comes from the word idea. Ideation can be defined as
the process of generating a broad set of ideas on a
given topic with no attempt to judge or evaluate them. The broad set of ideas
part is really important. Ideation is all about coming
up with lots and lots of ideas, and the no judgment
part is important, too. We need to be able to explore
all ideas without judging them and throwing them out. Some of the most crazy
ideas can actually prove to be really valuable. For example, from the
early to mid 2000s, mobile phones were getting
smaller and smaller. The idea for a drastically
larger mobile phone like the iPhone seemed
crazy at the time, but history has shown that
larger phones ended up meeting users' needs much
better than smaller phones. Today, companies
that make phones brag about the large
size of their screens, which is the complete opposite
of the conversation 20 years ago. One of the best
things about ideation is the mentality that
there are no bad ideas. So if coming up
with lots of ideas isn't your strongest
skill, don't worry. Part of being a designer
means intentionally exploring as many ideas as possible,
knowing that some of them or even most of them won't work. Plus, the more you practice
coming up with lots of ideas, the more natural it will feel. So what does ideation look
like in the real world for UX designers? A designer, either
individually or in a group, brainstorms out loud. Every idea is documented,
often on sticky notes or a whiteboard. The goal is quantity
of ideas over quality, so share as many
ideas as possible. No evaluation is
allowed at this stage. If you're brainstorming
in a group, make sure you gather a diverse
team for different backgrounds and perspectives. Question the obvious. It can be difficult to
question a common belief or practice if everyone
has the same opinions. Finally, after you come up with
a bunch of ideas, take a break. Then, everyone should come back
together to evaluate the ideas. When reviewing the ideas,
it's important to have a reason for picking the
idea you move forward with. There are a few common ways
to evaluate your ideas. First, is the idea feasible? Is it technically
possible to build? Next, is the idea desirable? Does it solve the user
problem you're focusing on? And lastly, is your idea viable? Is it financially
beneficial for the business? If an idea meets
these three criteria, it might be a good option
to move forward with. All right. So now, we know
what ideation is, what ideation looks
like in the real world, and how to evaluate ideas. Up next, you'll learn why
coming up with lots of ideas is so important. Enjoy. All right. So now, we know what
it means to ideate, but why is coming up with
lots of ideas so important? That's what we'll
answer in this video. To get our brain pumping,
let's ideate solutions for this problem. Olivia is a parent
who needs a way to ride her bike with
her two-year-old Luca because he can't
ride his own bike. There are lots of solutions
to this problem that exist already, but let's
imagine it's a new product. To solve for this problem,
you could design a seat behind the adult
rider, a seat in front of the adult rider, a bicycle
built for two requiring the child to pedal
with the adult, a mini bike attachment
for the child to ride behind the adult,
a basket on the handlebars for the child to sit in, a
sidecar like you might find on a motorcycle, a seat that
attaches to the adult's helmet, or a covered trailer to
pull behind the bike. Are some of these
ideas ridiculous? Absolutely. But when you're
ideating, you want to push past the obvious ideas
to get to the innovative ones. Remember, ideation is focused on
coming up with a lot of ideas. Why? For one, the list of your
ideas will be narrowed down when you have to think about
constraints, like budget and timelines. For example, your
biggest idea might not be possible because of your
team's budget constraints. You want to start with a
long list of potential ideas so that when constraints
are introduced, you still have solutions
that could work. In addition, we need to come up
with ideas that are equitable. The first idea you come up
with might be perfect for you as a user, but when we're
designing with equity in mind, we want to make sure that
the design works for everyone who will use the product. There are a lot of
solutions to every problem, but we want to find the one that
works best for your users, not you. Lastly, keep in mind
that you might not be the one to decide which
idea is the best solution. Instead, let users test
a bunch of your ideas, and they might find
the right answer. So now that you understand
why exploring lots of ideas is so beneficial, we can
start the ideation process. Coming up, we will show
you how to evaluate ideas based on business needs. We now know how to come
up with lots of ideas and evaluate those ideas. As you ideate, it's important
to think about the business you are designing for. This includes the business's
voice, tone, and budget. That's what we'll
focus on in this video, understanding the business
needs behind design. UX designers often work closely
with marketing and branding teams. That's because branding
has a big effect on how users experience a product. Two major components of
branding are voice and tone. Even though a brand
isn't a human being, it still has a personality. Users don't want to
communicate with a brand that uses robotic-sounding language. Instead, users want to
interact with the brand whose voice and tone sounds
human and engaging. Here's the thing. Voice and tone have a huge
impact on a user's experience with a product. For example, imagine you place
an order online for shoes and receive a confirmation
email that says, "Great choice! Your purchase should be
landing on your doorstep in the next five days. Let us know how
much you love it." When you order another pair of
shoes from a different company, the confirmation
says, "Order shipped. Estimated arrival, five
to seven business days." The first email feels
enthusiastic and conversational, while the second
email feels cold and detached. Small changes in language
communicate a brand's voice and tone and help improve
the user experience. As we continue
through this program, you'll see how design
can help facilitate a conversation between a
business and its users. For example, Apple and Google
might each have a product that focuses on similar user
needs, but the approach, tone, and branding for that product
can be really different. In addition, we
need to keep in mind the fundamentals of driving
sales when designing. For example, imagine you are
designing an e-commerce site. You want to make it easy to
find the Check Out button. This improves the user
experience and drive sales, so your design benefits both
the customer and the business. A win-win. Finally, it's
helpful to research your brand's competitors as
part of the design exploration. Knowing the successes and
failures of your competition can help influence
your design decisions. That might involve
asking questions like, how do your competitors
approach the checkout cart? Or what does your competitor's
sign-up process look like? To recap, we need to
consider both the business needs and the user's
needs when designing. Next, we'll investigate
our competitors, so get your
detective gear ready. A competitive audit is an
overview of your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. We know that it's important
to come up with lots of ideas before deciding on one solution. A competitive audit
is just one tool to explore ideas
for designs so we can learn from others about
what has worked and not worked. Let's begin by
discussing what you can learn from a competitive audit. This includes identifying
your key competitors, reviewing the products that
your competitors offer, understanding how your
competitors position themselves in the market, examining what
your competition does well and what they could do
better, and considering how your competitors
talk about themselves. So who do you consider
to be your competition? To be thorough,
you should include both direct and indirect
competitors in your audit. Grab your magnifying glass. Direct competitors have
offerings, meaning products, services, or features, that
are similar to your product and focus on the same audience. Essentially, you're both trying
to solve the same problem. Indirect competitors are
a little more nuanced. They either have a
similar set of offerings but focus on a different
audience than you, or they have a different
set of offerings and focus on the
same audience as you. For example, let's say you're
creating a weight loss app that focuses on people in their 30s. Your direct competitors
are other companies that also make weight
loss apps targeted at people in their 30s. Your indirect competitors
are any company that makes health or
wellness apps targeted at people in their 30s or
make weight loss apps targeted at people in a
different age bracket. It's helpful to audit a
wide range of products that compete with yours to get
a full picture of the landscape. In UX design,
competitive audits are important for a few key reasons. Let's investigate. First, they help inform
your design process. How did your
competitors approach designing their products? Knowing what others have done
can help you make better design decisions for your own product. Second, competitive audits help
you solve usability problems. Is your competitor's
website difficult to use? If so, you know what to
avoid for your own website. Third, competitive audits can
reveal gaps in the market. Are there user needs your
competitors do not meet? Your product might be able
to address these user needs. Fourth, competitive audits
provide reliable evidence. Why is it important
to gather evidence? Design ideas are
most successful when there's a deep understanding of
business needs and market gaps. Competitive audits
are a huge part of gathering that information. Knowing all of these
things can help you save time, money, and energy. I know we all want
to be detectives, but who actually
conducts an audit? Well, it depends
on where you work. A smaller company might have
a single UX designer conduct the audit, while a
larger company might have an entire team to do the work. Either way, it's
important for you to know how to put together
a competitive audit because it's critical to
your work as a UX designer. Let's start with the
biggest limitation first. Competitive audits
can stifle creativity. If you spend too
much time focusing on what others are doing,
you might prevent yourself from creating a truly
innovative product. Innovation doesn't happen
by copying the competition. The key is to understand
what the competition is doing and use that as a starting point
to push forward and innovate. Another limitation
is that the success of the competitive audit
depends on how well you interpret the findings. Analyzing data can be
tricky, and it's a skill that you'll develop throughout
your career as a designer. Working on a team
can be helpful here as you'll have others to
interpret the data with. Another thing to keep in mind
while doing a competitive audit is that not all designs
work in all use cases. The features that work
well for a competitor might not work well
for your product if you serve different users. For example, imagine
you're designing a website for a clothing company. A competitor has a
feature that shows photos of customers
wearing their brand's clothing on social media. But if your audience doesn't
regularly use social media, this feature is not a good
fit for your clothing website. One last thing to call out. You should do competitive
audits on a regular basis, not just once. You want to stay on top of
what your competitors are doing and keep an eye out for new
competitors that might emerge. All right. Now that we've
discussed why we do competitive audits and their
limitations, coming up, we'll share the specific
steps to take when conducting a competitive audit. Let's go. Now that you understand why
we use competitive audits, let's go through
how to conduct one. The first step is
to outline the goals for your competitive audit. Make sure your
goals are specific. It can help to break
down your goals into the different product
features you want to compare. For example, imagine
you're reviewing three competing e-commerce websites. Your overall goal is to compare
the features of the shopping experience on each site. If we broke that goal down
to be a bit more specific, there are a few features you
might focus on comparing-- customer reviews and ratings,
return policy details, or delivery and
in-store pickup options. Or imagine you are reviewing
two subscription-based music streaming platforms. In this case, your
competitive audit might focus on features
like pricing options, browse and search functions, and
creating and sharing playlists. As you might notice,
your specific goals will differ based on the
kinds of companies you review, so these two examples are just
a small fraction of the goals your audit might include. OK. Now, you've outlined the goals
for your competitive audit. Next up, step two. Create a spreadsheet with
a list of your competitors. You should aim to include 5 to
10 competitors in your list. Some of the competitors
should be direct, and others should be indirect. As a reminder,
direct competitors have offerings that are
similar to your product and focus on the same audience. Essentially, you're both trying
to solve the same problem. Indirect competitors either
have a similar set of offerings but focus on a
different audience or have a different
set of offerings and focus on the same audience. Including both direct
and indirect competitors in your audit gives
a better picture of the full
competitive landscape. With your list of
competitors in mind, you're ready for step three. Call out the specific
features you want to compare. This list of features
should align to your goals for the audit. Let's quickly review a template. The names of your
competitors are listed down the left side of
the spreadsheet, and the names of the
features you want to compare are listed across the top. Now that your template
is all set up, you're ready for
step four, research. Visit each competitor's
website or app and take notes about
their features. Remember to include details
like what works well, what could be improved, and
whether your competitors' features meet the needs
of your specific audience. It's also helpful to
take lots of screenshots and link to them
in the spreadsheet. These will be important
to have for your report and presentation later on. After you've collected
all the information in your spreadsheet,
it's time for step five. Analyze your findings. Try to spot trends and themes. Ask yourself, what are the
similarities between you and your competitors? Is there a certain feature
that your competitors all approach in the same way? And finally, the last step
in a competitive audit is to summarize your
findings in a report. Your report might be a slide
presentation or a document. It's helpful to include
screenshots and simple charts or graphics. We'll go into more
detail about how to present your findings later. Let's take a step
back and remember how competitive audits fit into
the larger UX design process. As we've discussed, it's
important to come up with lots of ideas before
deciding on one solution. To explore ideas
for designs, there are many tools you can use. A competitive audit is one. Let's take that
one step further. How can we use the learnings
from our competitive audit to come up with even more ideas? Start by making a simple matrix
based on your competitive audit research. Focus on only the biggest themes
from your competitive audit, like the strengths and
weaknesses of your competitors, which are listed across
the top of the matrix. Then, to focus your
brainstorm, list a few features that you researched during
your competitive audit down the left side
of the matrix. For this example,
let's say we compared visual design usability
and usefulness of our competitors' products. Finally, select your
brainstorm group. Try to bring
together a team that can ideate from
different perspectives, including designers,
researchers, writers, and engineers. Now, you're ready to
start brainstorming. Take your team
through the matrix and make sure they understand
the strengths and weaknesses that you've listed. Start by identifying
low-hanging fruit. These are
easy-to-accomplish tasks that can make a
difference to your product with minimal effort. This means you should
come up with ideas that can be easily
implemented in your design, such as consistent formatting
or adding more color. Next ask the team to brainstorm
gaps or opportunities. For example let's say that
two of your competitors have a difficult
sign-up process. Is your product
sign-up process easy? Can you update your
sign-up process design to make your product stand
out compared to competitors? As you come up with ideas for
how your product can do better, you may even discover
new strengths that your competitors
haven't thought of yet. Once you've come up with lots
of ideas, begin sorting them. You can group similar ideas
together to uncover patterns, and a few ideas will
naturally rise to the top. Your goal is to walk
away from this brainstorm with a list of ideas that
help your product stand out from the competition. How Might We? is a
design thinking activity used to translate problems
into opportunities for design. Let's break that down. The word "how" encourages us
to explore a bunch of ideas instead of moving forward with
only one idea for the solution. The word "how" suggests that
we don't have an answer yet. The word "might"
emphasizes that our ideas are possible solutions,
not the only solution. Finally, the word "we" suggests
a collaborative effort. Coming up with ideas
requires teamwork. Think back to our
example from earlier. Olivia is a parent
who needs a way to ride her bike with
her two-year-old Luca because he can't
ride his own bike. We came up with a lot
of potential solutions to Olivia's need. Let's try coming up with
some more ideas using the How Might We? exercise. For example, how might we
design a seat for a child to ride a bike with an adult? Well, that's a fairly
broad question. What about, how might we design
a safe, forward-facing seat that attaches to
an adult's bicycle so that a child can
choose to ride or sleep while an adult rides
on a mountain trail? That's too specific. Try this instead. How might we design a safe and
comfortable seat for a child to ride a bike with an adult? The phrasing of
that last question is what we're looking for
during a How Might We? exercise. The question should be
specific in describing the needs of the user
but still have room for innovation in
the final product. This means the question
is broad enough to leave space for solutions
that might not be evident yet. As we know, during
the ideation phase, we want to come up
with a lot of ideas. So for this exercise,
we want to come up with a lot of How Might We?
questions, not just one. Coming up with How Might
We? questions can be tricky. To help, the design school
at Stanford University outlines a bunch of ways to
create How Might We? phrases. Some of them include,
amp up the good. For example, how might we
create a traveling experience for a parent and child
to enjoy together? Explore the opposite. How might we design a
bike for a two-year-old to ride with an adult instead
of our original framing of an adult who wants to ride
a bike with a two-year-old? Change a status quo. How might we improve public
transportation options in Olivia's hometown so that she
has options other than biking? And break the
point-of-view into pieces. How might we make a two-year-old
comfortable on a bike? How might we easily travel
from point A to point B? There are more ways to
reframe the problem covered in the course readings, too. Asking How Might We?
questions is just one way to ideate and approach
a design problem. It might be incredibly
helpful to you and your team, or you might find another
exercise that works better. Either way, reframing the user's
need as a question can help you think of your users and
their needs in a new way. Next, we'll talk about another
ideation process, sketching. Sketching is just
what it sounds like-- drawing your potential
solutions to the design problem. Coming up, we'll go over
a popular and useful way to sketch that's
called Crazy Eights. Get excited. So this is it. We're ready to start drawing. For some of you, this will be
your favorite part of design. For others, drawing can
be a little intimidating. The good news is
that we're going to create truly simple designs. In fact, your drawings
don't actually have to look like
anything in particular. Remember that in
the ideation phase, we're just exploring
lots of ideas, not trying to create
something beautiful. So let me show you. Grab a piece of paper
and a pencil or marker. We're going to
practice sketching. Let's start by
drawing basic shapes-- triangles, squares, and circles. Add in straight
and squiggly lines. Sprinkle in a few stick
figures of humans. You might need a
bit of text as well. Here's a pro tip. Use all caps if your
handwriting isn't neat, and write horizontally
so it's easy to read. Soon, when you're
more experienced, you might switch from drawing
basic shapes to drawing phone screens or websites so that your
sketches look more realistic, but for now, just
draw what you know. So there you go. You've learned to sketch. Simple, right? To learn more about the
benefits of sketching and explore some techniques,
check out the reading materials in the course. You might be wondering
why we sketch by hand and don't do this
on a computer where it's easy to copy and
paste premade shapes. Well, you certainly can
do this on a computer, but the point of sketching is
to move as quickly as possible to record lots of ideas. Technology can
sometimes hold us back when our hands want to move
faster than our brains, so sketching by hand is
a valuable skill for you to master. Remember our
example from earlier where Olivia needed
a way to ride her bike with her two-year-old
who couldn't ride his own bike? We came up with eight ideas
to solve Olivia's problem. That process was basically
a polished version of Crazy Eights. This type of ideation
is a very common part of the design sprint process. In the ideate phase
of a design sprint, the whole team might come
together and do the Crazy Eights exercise. Crazy Eights lets
you compare ideas, see everyone's different
ideas, and narrow down the list of ideas before moving
on with the best solutions. And don't forget the
best solution is always what your users think is best
and not what you or your team thinks is best. Right now, to get
started, you'll try the Crazy Eights
exercise on your own. So the setup for
Crazy Eights is easy. You'll need a large
sheet of paper. Regular printer
paper will work fine, but if you have something
larger, that's even better. Fold the paper in half,
then fold it in half again, then in
half one more time. Now, you have eight rectangles
that are about the same size. Each of the eight spaces
will be for a different idea. That's where the Crazy
Eights name comes from, if you were wondering. Next, find something
to draw with. A lot of designers like
Sharpies because they create distinct
lines, or you might want to use a pencil so that
you can darken certain areas. You'll also need a timer. The Crazy Eights exercise
will take eight minutes, one minute for each idea. Any kind of timer will work-- your phone, Google Search,
or a wind-up kitchen timer. Finally, you'll need to
refer to a problem statement. You'll sketch eight ideas
to address that problem. To inspire you, let's go
through an example based on a new problem statement. Charles is a retired
grandfather who needs a way to keep his
essential belongings with him because he often loses
track of his wallet. I'll draw eight ideas for this
one to serve as an example. Later, you'll do this
exercise yourself. Remember, no idea
is too wild, so I'll draw any solution
that comes to mind. Here we go. [MUSIC PLAYING] Here are some of the
ideas I came up with to address our
problem statement. Let's walk through four of them. As a reminder, our
problem statement was, Charles is a retired
grandfather who needs a way to keep his essential belongings
with him because he often loses track of his wallet. Sketch one, an
alarm that goes off as Charles opens and
closes his house's exterior doors to remind him to
bring certain belongings like his wallet,
keys, and phone. Sketch two, a sign
on his front door that says, "Remember to
take these things with you. Place them here
when you get home." Sketch three, a doormat
with a checklist that says, phone, keys, and wallet. Sketch four-- and my
personal favorite-- shoes with false bottoms that
he can keep a wallet in. Now, you are ready to try
Crazy Eights on your own. Try using a problem statement
that we outlined earlier in the course like this one. Amal is an athlete
who needs a way to sign up for workout
classes, because the class he wants to participate
in fills up fast. Or choose your own
problem statement. Pause the video and
start your timer. Remember, spend one
minute on each idea and sketch possible solutions
to solve this problem. Congratulations! You just did your first
set of Crazy Eights. How did that feel? Were you able to come
up with eight ideas? The Crazy Eights exercise is
great practice for any design problem you need to solve. The sketching and ideating both
get easier the more you do it. As a refresher, a user
journey is the series of experiences a user has while
interacting with a product. Building off
personas and stories, journeys help you think
and feel like the user. Earlier, we defined
this problem statement. Olivia is a parent
who needs a way to ride her bike with
her two-year-old son Luca because he can't
ride his own bike. But we didn't actually
create user personas for Olivia and Luca. As a refresher, personas
are fictional characters that represent a
product's user groups. They're created to identify
a user's behavioral patterns. In the real world, we would
have completed research before beginning our designs. For example, consider
the kid's bike seat that's in front of the rider. This is a pretty great
solution for toddlers who are small but still
strong enough to sit upright. But what if Luca were an infant? A small baby wouldn't be able
to sit upright in that seat or wear a helmet, so it's
not a safe solution for Luca. Or if Luca is much
bigger but isn't able to ride his
own bike because he has special needs or there's
too much traffic for a child to ride alone, that seat
arrangement won't work either. It's OK if a specific
design doesn't work for everyone who shares
Olivia's problem of needing a safe bike seat for her
child, but part of the research process requires you
as the UX designer to figure out who
you're designing for and what their needs are. Olivia might need an
entirely new solution. So think back to
your user journeys for the problem statement you
outlined and designed for. Did you keep those personas
in mind while sketching? If not, go back and add
their stories and needs into your designs. Maybe you're not sure
you have enough research to make the call on what
solution Olivia really needs. In this hypothetical
interview, did you forget to ask Olivia
how tall her child is or what his specific needs are? And what about Olivia's needs? Some of our bike
solutions from before could create an extra
hassle for the rider. I'm looking at you, sidecar. If Olivia rides her bike
on back country roads, that might work perfectly. But if she lives in a big
city with designated bike lanes on busy streets,
the size of the sidecar probably wouldn't be a
good solution either. It's OK if you didn't
ask the right questions. You're still learning. Plus, sometimes in
the ideation phase, new blockers come up that
never occurred to us before. If this happens,
consider whether you have enough information
to go forward or whether you need to
go back to your research and collect more data. This work you've done
from writing user personas to mapping the user
journey to exploring design concepts through
sketching is a great story to tell in your portfolio. It might not be a final project
that you decide to share, but telling the story
of the research, the problem, and the
proposed solutions is good practice for the
more detailed case studies you'll have in the future,
and it's something employers might look for when
reviewing your portfolio. All right. We've reached the end
of the ideate phase. Let's review what
you've learned. Understanding design ideation,
conducting competitive audits, brainstorming approaches like
How Might We? and Crazy Eights, and determining if we
need additional research. Coming up next, we're going
to dig into user experience research. This is my personal
area of expertise, so I'm really excited to
share what I know with you. See you soon. DAVE: Congratulations
on finishing this course from the Google UX
Design Certificate. You can access the full
experience, including job search help, and start
to earn your certificate by clicking on the icon or the
link in the description below. Watch the next video in the
course by clicking here, and subscribe to our channel
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