How to explain your ideas…

Product design company Zurb was in Melbourne recently at a session on ideation. These creative people spend their every waking hour creating; they're constantly designing products, websites and online services. 

But it's not always a smooth path... uncovering your awesome ideas so you can get your thinking 'out there' to people in the shape of a product or service. 

My visual notes reflect some of the hottest tips on ideation:

• Use stories (more engaging than boring zzzzz features and benefits)
• Set a time limit or 'time box' so brainstorming time is constrained 
• Get user feedback to inspire and generate new thinking
• Use a Sharpie marker to sketch out your thinking
• Keep your sketches 'lo fi' and rough
• Go for quality ideas not quantity

Then once you've got some ideas down, group them together in chunks or clusters so they're easier for people to see, understand and digest. 

Go ahead and encourage some wild ideas with the team this week! It's the actual process of coming up with ideas, the 'ideation', that gives structure to creative thinking.

In the words of Albert Einstein: "If I can't picture it, I can't understand it'.