Capturing Inspiration to Drive Your Product Forward
What is design thinking really? Design thinking is all about using a clever succession of exercises that inspire creativity and get participants to view user problems from different perspectives.
To encourage participants, we at The Product Architects like to highlight inspirational elements from other thriving industries. Some companies prefer to study competitors but competitors have generally built products based on their strengths, not yours.
We believe that your products and services should be built on your own strengths, not those of your competitors. Consequently, we rarely look at competitors during workshops. Doing so will influence participants and they won't be able to stop referring to their competitors for the remainder of the sprint.
How and where can you find inspiration?
An exercise that designers often use to find and capture inspiration is a lightning demo. Lightning demos are fascinatingly effective and inspire creativity without having to reinvent the wheel. The goal is to identify the best elements of a comparable service or product from other industries, then draw inspiration from them to implement into a new future product or service.
The outcome of the exercise is especially beneficial and helpful for future steps in a Design Sprint. Lightning demos are also an effective way to get participants to become more aware of visual styles or elements that they like and to understand why they like them.
Consider this scenario
Imagine a scenario where you work for a SaaS company supporting marketing campaigns and you need to design a new dashboard. How do you get started? Where can you find inspiration?
Ask your colleagues to think of successful dashboards. Then get them to state a maximum of three reasons that point out what they liked about these examples. Even though these examples are not directly linked to your industry, you can learn a lot from them.
Excellent examples are LinkedIn profile dashboards and health apps:
- LinkedIn is an ideal example of successful product gamification. The dashboard displays profiles almost perfectly and a user is motivated to complete its almost perfect status.
- The iPhone health app pushes users to walk a minimum number of steps per day (5,000). Such a seemingly simple app has managed to change the behaviour of millions of people. The app's dashboard is a perfect example of designing for trigger-based user actions.
Lightning demo in action
Are you wondering how to structure this exercise internally? We suggest conducting a 30-minute workshop where you, as a facilitator, print out your colleagues' ideas and put them up on a wall.
Let each participant explain their example within 2 minutes. Hold a 5–10 minute Q&A, then give participants vote stickers that they can place on aspects they like. As a team, you will obtain a heat map highlighting the best ideas.
Now try to think about how you can translate these ideas into your product and roadmap. Good luck!
Still feeling lost or uncertain? Get in touch with us to receive a lightning demo template that will clearly lay out each step you need to take.
