• The 4 Phases
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    • Phase 1Observation
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      • AEIOU Framework
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      • Content Audit
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    • Phase 2Creation
      • 6 Thinking Hats
      • Brainstorming
      • Card Sorting
      • Challenge Assumptions
      • Could, Should, Must
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      • Emotional Journey Map
      • Empathy Map
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      • Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD)
      • Journey Mapping
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      • Stakeholder Map
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      • User Testing
      • Value Proposition
      • World Café
    • Phase 3Implementation
      • A/B Testing
      • Could, Should, Must
      • Innovation Board
      • Mobile Diaries
      • Product Love Letters
      • Storyboards
      • User Interviews
      • User Stories
    • Phase 4Validation
      • A/B Testing
      • Concept Testing Plan
      • Contextual Inquiry Plan
      • Hypothesis Testing
      • Innovation Board
      • KPI (Key Performance Indicator) Tracking
      • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
      • Surveys
      • User Interviews
      • User Stories
      • User Testing
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  • UXSD Team
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  1. UX Toolkit
  2. Methods
  3. Brainstorming
beginnercreation
BrainstormingGet familiar with a topic and quickly generate a lot of ideas.
10 - 30 min2 - 8 Participantsworkshopsolocreative
+4
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Summary
This very basic Brainstorming exercise can be used to warm-up at the beginning of a workshop and to build a very broad foundation of ideas on which can then be built on. You will come up with a lot of topics in a short period of time and sort these topics into groups. To generate more ideas, the same problem can be viewed from different perspectives, e.g. different roles, ages, or eras.
Step-by-step
  1. Announce a specific topic that all participants have a certain amount of knowledge about. Give users or user groups five minutes to write down as many ideas on post-it’s as possible. Repeat if necessary with other perspectives. Remember the post-it rules and keep everything clean and readable.
  2. Let your users group the post-it’s thematically and name the groups with headlines on separate post-it’s. It is allowed to constructively criticise at this point and to suggest other group constellations. At the end of this exercise, you could use the groups or post-it's that are very important for further investigation.
What you need
  • Post-it's
  • Pens
External resources
  • Creative thinking
    by TEDx Talks
Do you have a question?
These methods might seem simple, but applying them in a real project is another story. We’re there to help. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to get in touch with us at the User Experience Strategy & Design team.
Ask Away!
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