Tag: Brainstorming

The point of this stage is to analyse the result of the brainstorm, compare and contrast the lists that were generated, and start to consider the patterns, concepts and themes that emerge from that.

The Result

I took the full 20 minutes to came up with a list of general themes that could potentially lend themselves to solid app concepts, and satisfy the requirements of the jam theme. It then only took me a further 22.5 minutes to put a little flesh on the bones for each of the the top 5 themes to turn them into high level concepts (in no particular order):

1. A treasure hunt style game for children, to guide them around an attraction or location e.g. a zoo or maybe a city centre, imposing restrictions, such as road blocks, along the way, They could be collecting tokens as they go, which generates a score, dictating their position on a leader board, where they can see how they performed, relative to their opponents (all other users).
2. A cookery competition where opponents are guided by a recipe, with ingredient and time restrictions, with the video/ photo results uploaded to compete for likes.
3. A habit breaker, that guides the user from their nemesis (opponent) ingrained habit, to freedom from the restricted lifestyle that the habit causes.
4. A mentoring platform that matches those seeking guidance through a project, due to their restricted experience and/or ability. The user will then compete against opponent mentees to be selected by the mentor.
5. A CRM and work management tool for independent tradespeople, guiding them through an efficient process from initial customer contact, through quoting, invoicing and building an ongoing relationship with the customer. Many Independent tradespeople are restricted by time and know how when it comes to administration and establishing an effective process. Using this app will help them to win jobs over opponent tradespeople.

I have managed to bank almost an hour of allotted time for this stage. The ideas flowed faster than I had expected them to, but, I do put some of this gain down to an overestimation of the time required to achieve this.

I now need to apply some evaluation criteria to whittle this list down to just 2 contenders…

The purpose of this stage is to build upon the dictionary definitions of “GUIDE”, “OPPONENT” and “RESTRICTED” in a free flowing, unfiltered brain dump of word associations, synonyms, antonyms and anything else that might come to mind.

For the sake of clawing back the time lost during the dictionary definitions stage, I restricted my time on each of the words, and used good old pen and paper as my tools for the job, rather than employing digital methods. The benefit being that it is far quicker to scribble down the ideas as they come into your head, but this comes with the cost of presentation. In reality, this is not a problem as the true purpose is to generate ideas for yourself,. however, in this instance, the outcome will be shared in this blog post, so all I can do is apologise to the reader for my very untidy handwriting, which you will probably find illegible. I can read it, and that’s all that really matters.

The Result

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I found that once I got started, the ideas flowed fairly quickly and effortlessly, up to a point, and then a more conscious thought process engaged as the speed of idea generation reduced. 15 minutes was adequate time for each of these words and so I called a halt early, which creates 5.5 minutes of extra time for the rest of my plan, which I’m sure I will be thankful for at some point.