Developing Big and Small Ideas
When you’re loving your users, and filled with inspiration, how do you turn the ideas you have into concepts you can share with your teammates, and leaders? I like combining writing my ideas down, and using a mental framework to transform ideas into tools to reach for and use as I plan and execute on projects.
Adam Scott, John Turturro and Zach Cherry in “Severance,” Apple TV+.
The journey isn’t linear
Let’s first dispel a false narrative for creative ideas — that they are triggered and implemented in a linear fashion. Creative ideas are too often presented to us in media as being linear. In stories, characters begin a journey, encounter information and inputs, then are faced with a challenge to overcome. These challenges are then solved from some brilliant idea directly derived from some input on that journey, and provide a neatly-packaged solution to the problem at hand. These stories teach us we:
Encounter a problem or have a scenario presented to us
We do some magical “hard thinking”
We pick a solution that works perfectly
Implement our magic solution
Have a dance party
This will likely not be your experience with your product ideas, and more importantly, it’s not how Product Design works at all, and you might find yourself on teams with Engineers and Product Managers who may not understand this.
Something that makes product design a joyful profession is that it often requires us to see ideas through to quite an advanced state in order to actually validate wether a products qualities — both mechanical, and ineffable, are usable and valuable to the humans on the other end of the relationship. No single idea or solution usually ends up being a clean fit for the problem at hand.
Here’s an example of a day where you might find yourself idea-struck, and why it can be helpful to pause for a moment when encountering an idea:
In your morning shower an idea that hits you in the shower for a small ui problem you worked on the day before.
During lunch you stumble upon something from a website or another product that contains an interaction that stands out to you as particularly excellent, and might apply to some of the upcoming screens for your current project.
In an afternoon meeting with a colleague might give you ideas for a project that isn’t scheduled yet.
At dinner with a partner, you could reflect on a better approach to something that’s already in development.
Once you start thinking like a product designer, the world takes on a certain shape. You begin to see things and hold on to them, because they are important to you in some way.
Categorizing Product Design Ideas
Depending on your ability to remember your ideas, it may be beneficial to use a tool to jog your memory. Look for something quick and un-fancy. I often turn to the notes app on my phone, or leaving a tab open in my browser. Even snapping a photo or screenshot can do wonders for your memory. Anything that interrupts your life, or gives you too many tools to render details misses the point of experiencing things. Your go-to tool should feel natural to you. We don’t all think the same way. It’s why so many different products approach idea documentation in varied ways.
Once you start amassing a collection of related and disparate ideas, try setting aside a time for some kind of idea maintenance. Some of my best idea work is after breakfast with a coffee in hand. This is when you can look back on ideas you’ve documented and flesh them out, archive, or even categorize them.
One of my favorite ways of categorizing ideas is using a modified Eisenhower matrix. Here’s an example of dimensions that suit my brains approach to developing ideas I save:
Ryan’s Product Idea Matrix
I mentally categorize my product ideas as:
Big — The really cool stuff that will take a lot of work and refinement to realize
Small — The tactical executions that will improve product interfaces
Relevant — Closely related to my current projects or goals, and worth at least talking though
Irrelevant — Stuff that’s too interesting to dismiss, and could unlock future thinking, but not worth spending additional time on.
Why bother with categorizing ideas, even if it is just a mental exercise? Because creativity is so closely tied to the amount of energy and focus we have at any given point. Plus, good feedback will be based on someone else understanding of the scope and relevance of your ideas.
For example: Trying to take on designing an entire app requires a lot more time, energy, and buy-in than concepting a particular interaction or animation. Likewise, showing up with loads of screens for a big feature or idea that isn’t relevant to what your team is working on, might be met with negative reactions that leave you feeling like your ideas aren’t valued.
Your big, irrelevant ideas matter, and have plenty of value. They’re often the ideas that unlock the newest, and best product thinking, but they’re also the ideas that are the most fragile. Big ideas need more time, care, and definition from the designer before others might understand them and their value. Small ideas can be the type of quick-win catnip that non-designers tend to flock to, since they require less explanation, and often less execution. Product Designers that find themselves in organizations and teams that are only interested in small, relevant ideas, can grow bored or stifled over time.
Sharing and Presenting your ideas
With documented and organized ideas, you can visualize which ones you might want to share with others. Big ideas can be nurtured by collaborating with people you’re close with and can trust with helping you better define or bring vision to a big idea that you want to get made, perhaps you even want to pull in a technologist or business-minded person to talk about some of the ideas without visuals to help you refine what you plan on presenting. Big Ideas can be fun to pitch to groups — but the noise of the committee can often quickly stray from your original intent.
For small relevant ideas, you’re better off using your graphic communication muscles – jumping into a tool of choice to create enough fidelity to get feedback on your ideas. You’ll want to render ideas with more detail, examples, and documentation when working with less experienced teams, or find yourself getting feedback that people don’t understand what you’re suggesting. Presenting wholistic solutions, and complete concepts is an art within itself that we’ll have to cover later.
The speed and quality to which you can render ideas is a matter of practice. Practice developing your wildest, and most practical ideas into visuals to show others and start conversations. When you become very comfortable with your interface design capabilities, you’ll find it can be quite fun to assemble visuals in real-time when discussing possible solutions with a colleague. Resist the temptation to hoard your ideas, in the hopes of surprising your colleagues, and do your best to remain open and flexible as you ideas develop along the way.
If you find that, along the path, aspects of your ideas have been removed, or distorted in a way that isn’t better at achieving your goals, then take the uncomfortable step to re-visit your initial idea with those who are now charged with making it real, and discuss with them if those changes are for the better.
Ideas exist to be shared, and it’s a great joy to see an idea go on a journey from napkin, to something that users rely on regularly. It’s one of the great joys of our field.
