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ux-fundamentals
Conceive
2
Innovating to solve the problem

What it means

What you learn in the Understand phase will guide you to the solution that meets functional needs and works well for the user.

{% include image name="ux-fundamentals/conceive.png" style="max-width:256px;margin-top: 40px"%}

How we do it

Expectations and outputs

Entering the conceive stage, you have a clear design challenge and a team with experience working together. Exiting this second stage, you’ll have designed the solution, and we’re ready to start developing the product.

  • Expect to diverge in search of design solutions, create rough prototypes, evaluate, and iterate to the final design.
  • Keep your focus functional. Concentrate more on ideation and workflow and activities than visual design.

Getting started

It’s time to ideate and create. As with other parts of the creative process, the most important thing is to get started.

  • The Bootcamp Bootleg is a great source of information about exercises and activities you can do to get your creative energy flowing.
  • The Akamai Wizards team has produced a short Design Thinking Playbook with useful information on how to use design thinking in your work.
  • We recommend these resources as starting points. Each also contains suggestions for additional sources of info. Beyond that, you know how to use Google!

Regardless of what sources you use, we recommend you keep a few things in mind as you work. The following are adapted from the Design Thinking Playbook:

  • Focus on human values: Identify real user pain points and ground solutions in their needs.
  • Radical Collaboration: Breakthrough insights come from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. Be inclusive, and speak up if you have an alternative viewpoint to offer.
  • Be visual: Diagram, sketch—always aim to visualize your ideas and concepts to support creativity. If you think you “can’t draw,” don’t worry. The goal is communication. Have fun. By the way, the book Back of the Napkin1 is a good primer on communicating through simple sketching.
  • Favor action: Show your ideas and offer solutions.
  • Be solution-oriented: Come with solutions, not problems.
  • Defer judgment: Imagine first, evaluate later.
  • Craft clarity from uncertainty: Ambiguity is inherent in the creative process. Experiment to learn.

Tools and templates

As with the Understand stage, the Conceive stage relies on low-tech tools and close collaboration. The UXD team has prepared templates and recommendations that you can use as guidelines in your work:

Whiteboarding

Use the whiteboard to draw and communicate. Use the whole board. Photograph it often. Don’t be afraid to make changes.

Whiteboarding Guide{:target="_blank"}

Low-fi mockups

Don’t limit yourself. A mockup can be a drawing, a physical object, a diagram of a process, a script for a human interaction, a role-playing exercise...you name it. You’re generating and sharing ideas. Use your imagination.

Mockups Guide

Activity flows (workflows)

Pay attention to how activities and actions flow. Show the story of your user’s engagement with the product at important moments in their interaction, and how the pieces fit together. Worry less about the medium and more about the story.

Activity Flows Guide{:target="_blank"}

Wireframes

Wireframes show the essentials of the product design in enough detail to help the team understand and refine the design. They can also be used in user testing.

Wireframes Guide{:target="_blank"}

Prototypes

A prototype is richer and more detailed than a wireframe. Prototypes can reveal details of interaction beyond basic workflow and layout. When prototyping resist the temptation to put in more detail or interactivity than essential.

Prototypes Guide{:target="_blank"}

Moving forward

Congratulations! You have engaged your team and gotten to the point that you can get serious about creating working code. You’ll be ready to move forward when:

  • You’ve diverged, converged, and iterated. You’ve tried multiple paths to the best solution, and you have a solution that is consistent with the project brief, addresses critical activities and interactions, and is designed for the user.

  • You’ve modeled the main workflows and interactions. You don’t have to have every possible interaction and corner case defined to move forward. As long as you’ve defined the essentials, you should consider beginning to code.

  • You have overall consensus from the team—SMEs, designers, developers, writers, researchers, users, and product owner agree that it’s time to move forward. If you’re following a good design process, you’ve kept the whole cross-functional team in the loop. If not, you need to start taking some people to lunch and hope that you have favors you can call in.

Footnotes

  1. Roam, Dan. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013. Print. ISBN 9781591842699. ↩