Backcasting is a method for planning the actions necessary to reach desired future goals. This method is often applied in a workshop format with stakeholders participating.
To be used when a future goal (even if it is vague) has been identified.
An emotional journey is a visualization that maps and illustrates a user’s emotional experience through the experience of interacting with an organization, product or brand.
Get inspired today by a world 20 years away.
Sometimes it helps to start from the end. This exercise will help you align with your team on an audacious vision for your project - one that you can work backward from.
90-Minute Prototypes is a short and sweet prototyping workshop that challenges teams to build basic clickable app prototypes within 90 minutes. It’s easy to plan and run and demonstrates how rapidly an insight can be turned into a test-ready prototype. Use it to inspire your team to embrace a prototyping mindset.
You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking.
This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun!
Dot voting is a collective way of prioritizing and converging on a design solution that uses group voting.
To be used when there are more ideas than can be feasible to develop further.
A problem tree is a tool to clarify the hierarchy of problems addressed by the team within a design project; it represents high level problems or related sublevel problems.
Instead of directly asking people what they like or don’t like about a particular brand, product or service, this method gives insight into their perceptions by eliciting feelings based on real-life experiences and interactions through writing a love or breakup letter.
To be used in the ideation and user exploration phase.
A mind map is a diagram used to represent a number of ideas or things. Mind maps are methods for analyzing information and relationships.
The lotus blossom method is a creativity exercise. It is a framework for idea generation, starting from one central theme. Eight conceptual themes grow out from the main theme and each of them are used as central theme to generate 8 more themes. Explore!
Brainwriting is essentially the same as brainstorming. Ideas are generated by asking people to write them down instead of verbally presenting them.
Try on a relentlessly positive, can-do attitude before tackling the big stuff. The proverb goes "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Practice the art of positive thinking to unlock creative ideas. Use this as a warm-up before brainstorming or to energize your team meetings.
