Ideation >>> Creation of many alternative solutions increases the quality of the final design >>> UX Design: From Concept to Prototype
Ideation—creation of numerous variations on a solution—has been shown to lead to better final solutions than when a designer starts with just one or two ideas and iteratively refines those ideas. One reason for this is that creation of
=================================
As with most other types of ideation, generation of ideas in brainstorming is a fragile process that quickly grinds to a halt if participants start criticizing ideas that are being contributed. The goal of brainstorming is to come up with many ideas; the best way to do that is to let participants freely generate without worrying that what they say will be shot down.
=================================
Designers go back to sketching and other forms of ideation repeatedly throughout the process, every time they don’t know how proceed with some aspect of the design. Ideation can be used to come up with broad classes of solutions, features that the solution should contain, as well as precisely how a particular feature should work.
=================================
The emphasis on speed in ideation has to do with making generation of many alternative design solutions inexpensive, so the designer has a lot of material from which to pick strong elements, and so he/she feels comfortable discarding ideas that don’t contribute to a strong solution.
=================================
In order to keep a brainstorming session running smoothly and productively, the facilitator performs all of the functions on this list.
=================================
The goal of ideation is to generate many, many solutions—dozens or even hundreds. A large number of quickly and cheaply generated solutions allow designers to not feel committed to (potentially poor) ideas and to have enough raw materials from which to construct a high-quality design solution.
=================================
Tradeoff analysis is an important tool for selecting which solution to pursue among the contenders the designer came up with, but it’s not an ideation tool for generating those solutions in the first place.
=================================
In addition to being an effective ideation technique, sketching is an important communication tool. Many ideas in UX design are most effectively communicated to others—target users, programmers, business people—in a visual form. Sketching enables such communication at a level of detail that
=================================
While drawing skills are clearly valuable and they get better with practice, the rough nature of ideation sketches means that they can be done with minimal drawing skills.
