Ideation in Design Thinking

Last Updated : 04 Mar, 2024

Design thinking is a creative way to solve problems. It is the sum of all the processes that result in designing a prototype, Design thinking is all about showing empathy with the user. The most important step in the process of design thinking is Ideation. Ideation is a part of the design thinking process where the designer brainstorms and comes up with ideas or potential solutions to the issue the business may be facing regarding UI/UX design. In this article, we will discuss what Ideation is and what role it plays in the process of design thinking.

What is Ideation?

Ideation is a part of the design thinking process where the designer brainstorms and comes up with ideas or potential solutions to the issue the business may be facing in regard to UI/UX design.

In simpler terms, Ideation is coming up with ideas. In this step of design thinking, the designer creates ideas, develops existing ideas, and tries to innovate the existing design to solve a problem or optimize it.

Design Thinking is a five-step process:

Understanding the challenge and empathizing.
Defining the problem.
Ideation
Creating a prototype.
Testing the prototype, taking feedback and iterating.

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Ideation is the third and one of the most crucial steps of the design thinking process. During Ideation, we designers not only have to brainstorm ideas but we also have to come up with potential matches of applications or website that have similar problems like ours, and then try to match that solution with the insights we figured out in the first step of design thinking (which is “empathizing”).

Why is Ideation needed in Design Thinking?

Without ideation in design thinking, the process lacks the creativity and exploration necessary to generate innovative solutions, resulting in limited or conventional outcomes that may not effectively address the problem or meet user needs.

By fostering creativity and encouraging brainstorming, ideation enables teams to explore various perspectives and possibilities, leading to the development of more effective and impactful design solutions.

How to Prepare before starting Ideation

In order to prevent the risk of getting lost, it is important to take into account the first two stages of the Design Thinking Process before starting Ideation. The Empathise and Design stages of Design process are essential because:

Empathise: The Empathize stage of design thinking involves deeply understanding the needs, emotions, and experiences of users through observation, interviews, and immersion in their environment. It aims to cultivate empathy and uncover insights that serve as the foundation for designing solutions that genuinely address users’ challenges and aspirations.

Design: The Design stage of design thinking involves synthesizing insights gathered during the empathy phase to develop creative solutions to the identified problem or opportunity. This phase focuses on refining concepts based on user feedback, refining functionality, and ensuring alignment with user needs and preferences.

How to Ideate?

Following are the points that one must remember during the process of ideation for design thinking:

Quantity over Quality: An important thing to keep in mind during Ideation is that this process is not about quality but the quantity of thoughts and ideas that we are going for at first. We can determine quality later but getting as many ideas out at the beginning is the critical part and for that we have to suspend judgment and allow ideas to come in.
High Level thinking: High level thinking means to not think in silos and take a bird’s eye prespective on the entire user interface and experience. While in an Ideation session, make sure to not be too specific about a process and think in broader, later we can narrow down our approach.
Getting into the User’s head: User Centricity is essential for any digital design. While brainstorming ideas and coming up with solutions, make sure to keep the user needs in priority as as we say get into your user’s head and think what they actually need.
Novelty over Relevance: The toughest point in the process of Ideation is that the designers must focus on novelty over relevance. In the ideation process designers usually think if it is not relevant what good will it do. But in Design, it’s the novelty that is difficult for most of us and getting novel thinking, novel ideas out is the most important part to come up with innovative solutions.

Top 3 Ideation Techniques

The best 3 Ideation Techniques you must know for problem solving during design thinking process are:

Brainstorming: Brainstorming is the most commonly used ideation technique, in a Brainstorming session, a group of people discuss their potential solutions for a given problem and new ideas and counter ideas are generated within this interaction.
Storyboarding: Storyboarding is a ideation technique in which the designer create a visual story in order to structure and present their ideas. Storyboarding technique is more helpful for individual designers who have a proposed solution and then want to communicate it to others visually.
Mind Mapping: Mind mapping technique is used in early stage of an idea where you simply write the problem in a phrase in a rough paper and then around it you write possible solutions for the problem. Linking these solutions will be specifics on how to achieve these solutions.

Importance of Ideation

The Importance of Ideation can be understood under following points:

To orient the team around the user: Ideation will give not only you but your team a better understanding of who the user is and what they are struggling with and it will also get your team excited and really invested in solving the problems for those users.
Innovation breakthroughs: Innovation breakthroughs come from pushing past the obvious so only when the team may is allowed to think freely without any judgement, they may come up with the solutions that increase the potential for innovation.
Bringing different team members together: Ideation is also a group activity, it is also about bringing together different team members, different perspectives and listening to each other. This also leads to the team understanding and collaborating in much more efficient manner.

Conclusion

Design Thinking is both an ideology and a process, it is solving complex problems in a user centric way and Ideation has a very important role to play in Design thinking. Ideation is the process of coming up with as many ideas or solutions to a problem as you possibly can.

By understanding and working on the points we discussed in this article, an designer can some closer to the user, understand his/her problems and some up with better solutions to the problems which leads to a successful design thinking process.