100 User Experience (UX) Design and Evaluation Methods for Your Toolkit
This post will be different from previous ones that focused on only one UX method. Today we will look at ideation innovation and highlight three variations on traditional, face-to-face brainstorming – cheatstorming, extreme input, and DesignLibs.
In traditional brainstorming, a group will generate ideas and then choose which ones should be considered further using dot voting, ratings, specific criteria, or another technique for choosing the “best” ideas. When a new topic emerges, this brainstorming process is repeated. In my experience, the ideas from one brainstorming session are not reused. In cheatstorming, a method proposed by Faste and colleagues from CMU, the ideas from earlier brainstorming sessions are re-used. The ideation phase where a group tosses out ideas is skipped in cheatstorming and the focus is on choosing ideas from earlier pools of brainstorming ideas. The basic procedure for cheatstorming is:
- Make the ideas from previous brainstorming sessions available.
- When your team is ready to brainstorm on a new topic, pull a sample of random ideas from the earlier brainstorming results.
- Record the ideas that best relate to the new topic.
So, in cheatstorming, no new ideas are generated; old ideas are applied to new brainstorming questions.
At CHI 2013, Arne Janse and his colleagues presented a paper on the use of “extreme” inspirational material – sketches, personas, mood boards and scenarios -- for brainstorming. They presented extreme ideas (e.g., a device that indicated bank balances by squeezing your arm to the point of pain), extreme characters (a washed-out actor), and extreme personas (a gaming addict) to members of a brainstorming team and then assessed the number of original ideas generated in the extreme conditions versus a control that used non-extreme ideas. The preliminary results provide evidence that using extreme ideas as inspirational materials led to more original ideas. The underlying principle for brainstorming with extreme input is that the extreme examples can broaden the space of ideas and lead to insights that might be missed using conventional sources of inspiration.
Jared S. Bauer and Julie A. Kientz of the University of Washington developed an ideation technique called DesignLibs that is loosely based on Mad Libs™, a game where you are prompted to enter particular categories of information into blank fields. The information is then used to create a humorous or provocative short story or scenario. Bauer and Kientz tested three types of DesignLib concepts for generating novel, inspirational scenarios. The most successful technique required participants to “fill-in-the-blanks” of a scenario like the example below.
_________ is a ___ year old __________ who is somewhat chubby and struggling to get in shape. He/She decides to lose weight by trying a _______that can be worn on _____________ and provides ______ while ________.
Chauncey_______ is a ___63___ year old _UX Architect_________ who is somewhat chubby and struggling to get in shape. He/She decides to lose weight by trying a _pedometer_______that can be worn on _his wrist______________ and provides __tactile encouragement_____ while _tracking exercise_______.
The result of this DesignLibs technique is a set of novel usage scenarios as well as potential requirements. In this example, the entry, “tactile encouragement,” might prompt a designer to consider a device that vibrated to signal that a goal had been met during a workout. This ideation method is easy to use with remote users and provides insights for conceptual design.
I described three edgy ideation methods from CHI research that push the boundaries of UX methods. The next post which will examine “hybrid focus groups” which combine usability testing, polling, reviews, and prioritization exercises with group interviews.
Arne Jansen, Nicky Sulmon, Maarten Van Mechelen, Bieke Zaman, Jeroen Vanattenhoven, and Dirk De Grooff. 2013. Beyond the familiar?: exploring extreme input in brainstorms. In CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1347-1352.
Haakon Faste (2013). Chainstorming! Cheatstorming!. Retrieved August 7, 2013 from http://crowdresearch.org/blog/?p=5345
Haakon Faste, Nir Rachmel, Russell Essary, and Evan Sheehan. 2013. Brainstorm, Chainstorm, Cheatstorm, Tweetstorm: new ideation strategies for distributed HCI design. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1343-1352.
Jared S. Bauer and Julie A. Kientz. 2013. DesignLibs: a scenario-based design method for ideation. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1955-1958.