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    • Phase 3Implementation
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    • Phase 4Validation
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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
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!
Explore similar methods
Netnographyobservation
1+ Participants
4 h – 4 d

Observe different online communities and their behaviours.

Wizard of Ozcreation
3+ Participants
50 – 80 min

Test new features.

Eye Trackingimplementation
5+ Participants
100 – 195 min

Track where users are looking to improve on the user experience.

Hypothesis Testingobservation
2+ Participants
3 – 5 d

Making hypotheses and verifying their truthfulness to gain clarity about a product, a problem, or a group of people.

How Might Weobservation
2+ Participants
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This method is used to summarize research insights in a constructive way. By starting the phrases with “How might we“, it is implied that there is a solution to the problem but not what the solution actually is.

© Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, 2022.
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