Idea generation can come in many forms. It really depends on what the problem is, the size of the budget obviously that we're working to as well. But ultimately, we will still a creative brief. That brief is almost like a document for the creative team to go, this is what you're working towards. To get that simple idea all the way up to a prototype, the most efficient and quickest way is actually just pen and paper. It's very low-tech, it's something that's very ancient in its origins, but it's something that's still the easiest and quickest way to get an idea and get something into material form. Another good thing that we always try to teach the students is to write things down. We have lots of thoughts in our heads and ideas pop into you in the middle of the night, in the shower, when you are in the loo. You never know when you might have a spark of an idea; when you're down at the pub with mates or, whatever, it could be anywhere. Keep a little notebook next to you. Write them down, generate this book of ideas that you can sometimes attach to a client. You got a lot of ideas going through your head all the time, and you do lose them if you don't get them down. It's just a way to capture those thoughts and memories. From there it can take different turns. You can workshop with lots of different disciplines. Again, to cover the wall with post-it notes simplifies that down. Pick your top three, go into ideation on those, for example. You can then go into design and going to prototyping. Something that we do a lot at Atlassian is spikes. They could be mini-spikes or they could be three-month long spikes. We pluck people out of their day-to-day environments or their teams. They are usually specific people with a specific skill set or a specific point of view on the problem. We all just think about it, come with a bunch of solutions, and then from there design them, build them out, prototype them, and then bring them into testing. We tend to work in multidisciplinary teams; designers, teaming with developers, teaming with project managers. So, we bring this broad range of experience to the table. With that package, we co-develop with clients, solutions, and ideas to the problems. So, that's one way. Another way is just simply smaller projects, just two people. You can get two people, sitting in the corner of a coffee shop just coming up with ideas. It can be anywhere. So, the way that we will translate something like a sketch into a concept is, we'll really take advantage of how we work at Atlassian with our tryouts. We'll be able to take the designer as the owner of the experience, the product manager as the owner of the strategy, and the development team leader as the the owner of engineering, to understand how can this idea work from a design perspective, from a strategy business perspective, and from an engineering perspective. The first thing with taking an idea into concept is identifying the key message that you're trying to communicate in that idea. Once we have all our ideas gathered, post-it notes scattered across the wall, we begin grouping, refining, combining, and re-framing these ideas into groups. Then from there we form idea territories. So, these are overarching concepts that have multiple ideas in them. For example, if we're developing a campaign or website for a vitamin product, an idea territory maybe upgraded lifestyle that we present to the audience, and then how that's the resultant of the vitamin. So, once we have these idea territories, we then ask ourselves, "Okay, what does an upgraded lifestyle look like?" Then from there we have to sift through a visual vocabulary to visualize this idea into a concept. How we know an idea is innovative at Atlassian is all down to the feedback that we get from the people around us. It doesn't just happen overnight. It's about throwing a whole bunch of stuff out there. This is where sparring comes in really handy for us as designers. Where we'll come up with five different ideas that might translate into five very different concepts. The way that we work as a design team where we get to sit down and tear these ideas apart, really poke them, stress test them, see what's right, see what's wrong, that's what helps guide us towards understanding what is the right concept to work for. Innovation is a very interesting thing. Often times, if you have a very innovative idea, it's going to be a disrupting idea, and so you really want to balace it out. You need to have the ideas that are safe first as groundwork and foundation so you can support that innovation. You want to make sure that the customers using the product aren't completely thrown in the middle of nowhere, like not understanding how to actually use it. Where you want to innovate is those little pain points that people see every single day. The things that make that road really smooth. That's where you want to put your innovations. Generally, when we present concepts, I like to present a few. These are essentially different angles in which we've translated the idea into concepts. As a direct translation, very on brief answers to what the client wants, one that pushes that a bit further, then another concept that is completely lateral and more exploratory, innovative. With them, we work through the pros and the cons and sometimes we create a hybrid concept where we get the best from a few and narrow the direction down to one final concept that's the lead for development. So, the next stage, we'll take a concept and build it out into a UI or a prototype that we can then take to uses and start testing it with them. We look at what we want to test with users and potentially other stakeholders. We begin to figure out what's the purpose of a prototype, that being the next stage of concept. If it's to present, we'll create a prototype that's more of a navigational walk-through. If it's something that's highlighting a detail, we'll create for example, a video for an animation to communicate that. So the prototypes that we're building here are either simple click-throughs; things that just demonstrate the flow of a design itself, or we'll do like a more nuanced prototypes; something that's based in HTML and JavaScript that has rich interactions in it, that show off those small micro interactions, are things that will actually delight users. Then we can see the emotional response to it as well. So, this is the part where we'll really find out whether or not we are solving the right problem, or we will be able to take a UI to a customer and say, "What do you think? What do you reckon?" They'll be able to tell us if it's on the money for solving their problem or if we've strayed a bit too far from what they expected of the solution. That'll help us refine the concept and refine the UI into the right solution. The prototyping process is very varied. One of the key skills at D+I is our ability to work through mock-ups, proof of concepts, refined prototypes, advanced prototypes, and we do tailor it to each project depending on scale and requirements. We've got so many varied clients from startups to big multinationals, so that the process has got to mould to their process as well and the way they structure their company. For example, Evidure, part of Shriro, came up to us to design new barbecues. We have a discovery phase where we go out into the marketplace and we then try to have a bit of an understanding of what's already out there. How do people use the barbecues? How do they want to use the barbecues? What are some of those pain points? What are some of the experiences that need to be elevated in designing that barbecue. That process is key to setting up the next process which is our ideation, our design phase which is doing lots of sketches, creating 3D models to visualize our designs, rendering an opt for presentation which both helps us and the client to have a real-life view look of what the product would be in reality. We do that over and over again. It's not a linear process; it loops back around. So, we get to a point where sometimes, we design three concepts. It's not quite the right direction we've taken, but we've learned from that and then we swing back around, do a little bit of a discovery and re-take of where we're going in the next round of the concepts, and we do that again. It's interesting that one of the biggest challenges we've had was one of these smallest nuanced little interactions here. And it's simply just collapsing a sidebar. Making it so it's minimal and out of the way was something that we went through probably 40 variations of. Finding something that really delighted the customer, that was still easy to use, and it's really just a simple thing like "Oh yeah, Just collapse it or whatever." But finding just the motion of it, finding how it moves, how it interacts, and how customers perceive it, really changes the experience as a whole. It's at the prototyping level that you're really truly testing ideas. That's where you're going to get your best answers and that's what you can now inform the best outcomes. The more prototypes you build and the more you iterate with prototyping, the better outcomes you get, because you can put them in front of users, you can put them in front of technical developers, and build on the ideas. Really, it's adapting to the thing at hand that's going to be important when you're doing prototyping and research. Never are going to actually have a solution that works for every single thing that's out there. You need to be able to adapt and that's the core thing of research and prototyping; is adapting to the feedback and the situations that you have.
