Understand design ideation

What is design ideation?

Ideation is the process of generating a broad set of ideas on a given topic, without judging or evaluating any of them yet.

By the time you reach ideation, you've already done the hard work of understanding your users. You've interviewed them, mapped their journeys, and framed a clear problem to solve. Ideation is where you finally answer that problem with possible solutions, and lots of them.

Notice the second half of the definition: without judging them. That part trips up almost everyone. Our instinct is to evaluate an idea the moment it appears, decide it's too expensive or too weird, and quietly discard it. Ideation deliberately separates the creation of ideas from the evaluation of ideas, because doing both at once kills creativity.

Imagine you're designing a grocery delivery app and the problem is that users abandon their carts when delivery slots are full. An ideation session on that problem might produce fifty ideas, from waitlists and notifications to neighborhood pickup lockers. Most will never ship. That's fine. The goal right now is possibilities, not decisions.

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• #Ideation
• #DesignThinking
• #ProblemSolving

Why quantity beats quality

It sounds backwards, but at this stage more ideas really do beat better ideas. There are two reasons for this.

First, your earliest ideas are rarely your best ones. The first solutions that come to mind are usually the obvious ones, the same ideas your competitors already thought of. Original ideas tend to show up late, after the obvious ones have been exhausted and you're forced to think differently. If you stop at idea number five, you never reach idea number thirty, which might be the one that matters.

Second, ideas combine. A wild, unworkable suggestion often contains a fragment that, merged with someone else's idea, becomes something practical and new. Pickup lockers might be too expensive to build, but the underlying thought, letting neighbors share a delivery, could become a simple "split a slot with a friend" feature.

Quality still matters, of course. It just comes later, when you evaluate. During generation, treat every idea as raw material.

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• #Quantity
• #RawMaterial
• #Creativity

Diverge, then converge

Divergent thinking expands the number of possible solutions. Convergent thinking narrows them down to the ones worth pursuing.

Every good ideation process moves through these two modes, in that order. During the divergent phase, you open the problem up as wide as possible. No idea is off the table, and the only measure of success is how much ground you cover. During the convergent phase, you switch mindsets completely: now you group, compare, and select.

The most common ideation mistake is mixing the two modes, converging while you're still supposed to be diverging. The moment someone says "that would never work" in the middle of a brainstorm, the group starts self-censoring, and the flow of ideas dries up. Keep the phases clearly separated, even announcing them out loud: "For the next twenty minutes we only generate. After the break, we select."

There are many structured techniques that support each phase, such as How Might We questions, Crazy Eights sketching, journey-map ideation, and competitive audits; each of these deserves its own article, so we'll cover them separately.

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• #DivergentThinking
• #ConvergentThinking
• #Brainstorming

Rules of a good ideation session

Group ideation works best when everyone agrees on a few ground rules before starting. These four have become standard practice for a reason.

Defer judgment. No criticism, no eye-rolling, no "we tried that already." Evaluation has its own dedicated phase later. When people feel safe from judgment, they share the half-formed ideas that often turn out to be the most valuable.

Encourage wild ideas. Impractical ideas stretch the group's thinking. "What if delivery took thirty seconds?" is impossible, but it might lead someone to a realistic idea about showing live courier locations to make waiting feel shorter.

Build on the ideas of others. Say "yes, and" instead of "no, but." When a teammate suggests a waitlist for delivery slots, add to it: "Yes, and the app could auto-book the slot when it opens." Ideas grow through layering, not through debate.

Stay on topic. Wild ideas are welcome, tangents are not. A clear problem statement, visible to everyone during the session, keeps creative energy pointed at the problem you actually need to solve.

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• #DeferJudgment
• #WildIdeas
• #YesAnd
• #StayOnTopic

Who to invite and how to prepare

Ideation is not just for designers. Engineers know what's technically possible, support agents hear user complaints all day, and marketers understand how people discover the product. A diverse group produces more varied ideas than a room full of people with the same background and the same blind spots. Aim for roughly five to eight participants; larger groups tend to split into spectators and talkers.

Preparation matters more than the session itself. Before anyone walks in:

Frame the problem. Write a single, specific problem statement grounded in your research. "Users abandon carts when slots are full" invites ideas; "improve the app" invites chaos.

Share the research. Send key user insights ahead of time so participants ideate from evidence, not assumptions.

Set the logistics. Book a space, physical or a shared online whiteboard, gather sticky notes and markers, and appoint a facilitator to keep time and enforce the ground rules.

Timebox it. Short, focused rounds of ten to twenty minutes beat a rambling two-hour meeting. Energy fades fast.

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• #DiverseTeams
• #Facilitation
• #ProblemStatement

Evaluating ideas afterwards

Once the generation phase is over and the walls are covered in sticky notes, judgment is finally allowed back in the room. Start by grouping similar ideas into themes and removing duplicates. Then evaluate what remains against three questions borrowed from design thinking:

Feasibility: Can we actually build this with the technology, skills, and time we have?

Desirability: Do users actually want this? Does it solve the problem your research uncovered?

Viability: Does it make sense for the business? Can the company sustain it financially?

The ideas worth prototyping sit at the intersection of all three: buildable, wanted, and sustainable. An idea that users love but the business can't afford is just as dead as one nobody wants. We'll explore this framework in more depth later in the curriculum; for now, use the three questions as a simple filter to shortlist the ideas you'll take into prototyping.

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• #Feasibility
• #Desirability
• #Viability

Takeaways

Ideation is about generating many ideas first and judging them later, never both at once.

Diverge before you converge, protect the session with clear ground rules, invite people who think differently from you, and only then filter your ideas through feasibility, desirability, and viability. The techniques come next; the mindset comes first.