Ideation spikes

Early in our alpha, we realised we were trying to solve too many user needs at the same time. This meant we were becoming stuck.

The user needs we got stuck on were:

• explaining how amounts were arrived at, or ‘calculations’
• integrating relevant information about funding lines and the overall funding, or ‘contextual information’
• later, we also identified a need to explore how we might enable internal users to create bespoke statements within the context of a data-driven statement, or ‘customisation’

As design patterns can evolve with iterations, we could afford to leave these areas as placeholders and design them later. This meant we could stop talking about them while we learned more through designing, developing and testing our basic pattern.

We decided to schedule a workshop for each area and framed them as ideation spikes: creating ideas that meet our understanding of the user needs and developing some of these into more thought-out concepts.

What happened in an ideation spike

The agenda

Each workshop covered:

1. Welcome (5 minutes)
2. Reviewing previous research (20 minutes)
3. Generating bad ideas (20 minutes)
4. Break (up to 10 minutes)
5. Crazy eights – creating up to four ideas that could be implemented as an iteration, and four ideas that ignored all constraints (16 minutes)
6. Playback of ideas (15 minutes)
7. Dot voting to prioritise ideas (5 minutes)
8. Break (10 minutes)
9. Fleshing out prioritised ideas to become concepts (45 minutes)
10. Feedback on the session (5 minutes)

Who we invited

All people in the alpha team were invited. This helped to ensure there was a broad group of perspectives – particularly with software development and data analysis.

With limited stakeholder availability, we invited interested members from the Funding Service’s Senior Management Team (SMT), as well as product managers from Calculate Funding Service (CFS) and Manage Your Education and Skills Funding (MYESF).

Changes we made between workshops

Based on feedback from the first workshop, we:

• reduced the length of the workshop from three hours to around two-and-a-half hours – this helped to reduce participant fatigue
• introduced the ‘bad ideas’ activity to help people with generating good ideas – it can be difficult to switch into a headspace for creating ideas straight away
• merged 2 crazy eights sessions into one, so instead of eight ideas for both iterative and blue sky thinking, it’s four for each and in the same activity
• gave more time to playing back ideas – to help everyone understand ideas and kept up the energy

We also centred the last two workshops around a ‘how might we...’ question:

• How might we help users to understand the allocation information and how the funds can be used?
• How might we support tailored data-driven statements to communicate complex allocations in a meaningful way?

What we did after the workshops

The output of each workshop was between six and eight concepts: half were iterative suggestions, and the rest were transformational.

We translated these into a slide to play back as part of our regular meeting with the Senior Management Team (SMT) and our show and tells.

The outputs from our ideation spikes include a summary of the concepts, for sharing with senior stakeholders and others.

Each concept includes:

• a description
• a storyboard to show the change
• user needs and pain points it addresses
• what type of change is required
• the size of the change
• what could be delivered in 3, 6 and 12 months

We will present the final concepts as options as part of our recommendations for moving past this alpha.

Reflections

Timeboxing tricky user needs enabled us to break a series of circular discussions. In future alphas, this could be a useful technique to break areas of exploration down into sensible, contained and collaborative workshops.

It's important to adjust each workshop's format to make the most of attendees' skills and experience. As we had a series of workshops, we were able to fine tune the activities to make each session more productive and enjoyable.

Although we have generated ideas, our understanding of the problem continues to change based on emerging user research insight. This has generated further questions for us about our concepts, which could lead to better informed recommendations. This would, however, create a tension between having enough time to ideate based on technical understanding and leaving enough time to plan, hold and evaluate user research.