Good ideas don’t just happen. To come up with new ideas, you need relevant knowledge, experience, and inspiration. However, there are techniques that you can use to develop your creativity. For you, we have chosen methods: Design – Thinking, HOW-NOW-WOW, and Six Thinking Hats, which will help turn on your creative thinking.
Design – Thinking
Design thinking is a process that seeks to solve complex problems in a user-centric way. The ideology behind design thinking states that to develop innovative solutions, one must adopt a designer’s mindset and approach the problem from the user’s perspective.
What is the point: it helps to find a problem solution that considers the user interests.
When to use: you need to create a product that solves the user’s problems.
The design thinking process outlines 5 steps that bring this ideology to life:
It is important to note that the five phases, stages, or modes are not always sequential. However, they do not have to follow any specific order and often occur in parallel and repeat iteratively.
Empathy: Explore your user’s needs
You will have to get a complete picture of the problem you are trying to solve at this stage. Here auditing research can help you. It will help if you know your audience to remove your assumptions and focus only on the actual facts about the user’s problems.
Imagine that you are a detective and your task is to find out everything about your object.
Define: Describe needs and problems
Analyze what you learned in the previous step and summarize the results. Formulate the problem clearly and answer the questions in a user-centered way:
What difficulties and barriers are your users coming up against? What patterns do you observe? What is the big user problem that your team needs to solve?
Ideate
It’s time to think outside the box and look for innovative ways to solve problems, and it’s crucial to point out that the ideation stage is a judgment-free zone! So be as relaxed and at ease as possible.
If someone’s idea seems to you really not very much, do not judge, it is better to suggest improving it. In the meantime, there is no need to worry about it.Towards the end of the phase, you’ll narrow it down to a few ideas with which to move forward.
Prototype: Start building solutions
This is an experimental phase, the goal of which is to find the best solution. This is key in putting each solution to the test and highlighting any constraints and flaws. The proposed solutions may be accepted, improved, redesigned, or rejected throughout the prototype stage depending on how they fare in prototype form.
Test: Try the solution
Thoroughly test the best prototypes and implement all possibilities.
In reality, the testing phase results will often lead you back to a previous step, providing the insights you need to redefine the original problem statement or to come up with new ideas you hadn’t thought of before.
How Now Wow Matrix
The How Now Wow matrix is an excellent way to boost your creativity and develop new ideas. It consists of a 2×2 matrix with original ideas on the X-axis and some not-good ideas on the Y-axis. You work with your team to file your ideas into each category. To surpass the stagnant stream of stale strategies, you must think outside of the box to generate new, feasible ideas.
Wow is the best place. The task of your brainstorming session is to come to this conclusion when most of your ideas will be in this place.
Six Thinking Hats
Using six hats, the framework — developed by Dr. Edward de Bono — allows teams to structure abstract thinking for results more efficiently.
The six thinking hats are used to boost creative conversations and find new ideas and solutions by ensuring that a wide variety of viewpoints and thinking styles are represented.
The six hats are:
– The white hat: This is the objective hat, which focuses on facts and logic
– The red hat: This is the intuitive hat, focusing on emotion and instinct
– The black hat: This is the cautious hat used to predict negative outcomes
– The yellow hat: This is the optimistic hat, used to look for positive outcomes
– The green hat: This is the creative hat, where ideas are abundant and criticism spare
– The blue hat: This is the hat of control, used for management and organization
This is another technique that will help you during the brainstorming session: you need to give the participants “hats” and ask them not to go beyond them. For example, “black” cannot praise ideas, and “red” cannot collect facts.
Well, we have outlined three creative techniques, and we hope it will be helpful and interesting for you and you can create a lot of brilliant ideas! But we can also help you not only in theory but also in practice.
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