Process: Ideation

You’ve probably heard the popular saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. As UX design professionals, we make our living by communicating clearly through the use of visual elements and affordances, thus, enabling the productivity of others. If we do our job well, we seldom need to rely on using many words. Instead, the visualization skills that we hone through our profession benefit not only the users of the products we design; if we leverage them correctly, they also make our colleagues, stakeholders, and ourselves more productive.

Productive teams are typically teams that communicate well and have a shared understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish. Their shared understanding often stems from expressing their ideas and concepts in unique ways that gain stronger footholds in the minds of others, which fuels the team’s greater productivity. While there are many methods of expressing ideas and concepts that could aid our productivity, we’ve found that creating mind maps is one of the most effective techniques because of its versatility and scalability. Read More

“Speed.” This was the unflinching response Sandy Cutler, former Eaton CEO who is now retired, gave at a public meeting in Manhattan roughly ten years when a Wall Street analyst asked what worried him the most. Taking his answer further, Cutler said he was concerned that, as the company swelled through both acquisition and organic growth—already to nearly 100,000 employees globally—it would slow down. To be competitive, the company needed to be as fast as its smallest competitor.

People working in virtually every industry I’ve dealt with, in organizations from a few hundred to a hundred thousand, often say the same thing: “We’re too slow.” The fact is that, as you grow—even from a one-person show to a two-person partnership—your decision-making process becomes more complex and you begin to plant the seeds of bureaucracy. Left unchecked, bureaucracy seems to scale geometrically—the larger the organization, the more overhead bureaucracy requires. Workers need supervisors, those supervisors need managers, managers require directors, and on it goes. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the book Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas, by Martina Schell and James O’Brien. 2015 Morgan Kaufmann.

Chapter 16: Group Design Techniques

To get you started with group design workshop formats, we have collected our most-used techniques for building better products and services with the whole team. There are hundreds of great workshop formats that could easily fill another book, so this is just a small selection of group design formats that we use most often in our day-to-day design practices.

Facilitating a group can be challenging and mentally exhausting. If you are new to facilitation, start small and find a partner who can support you—another member of your creative group can be a great backup or give you the ability to split the group into two for some tasks, so you can concentrate on a smaller number of people. Read More