Ideation Mapping

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  Step 1: Divergent Thinking

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  Step 2: Emergent Thinking

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  Step 3: Convergent Thinking

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  All three stages of ideation mapping

Inspiration

Our team was inspired to create an Ideation Mapping template that helps teams from all disciplines to come together and brainstorm ideas. The ideation exercise goes through the 3 phases of ideation and helps teams hone in on several or finalize into one idea.

What it does

By combining the principles of Ideation Sessions and Information Architecture, teams are able to hold brainstorming sessions that are efficient, concise, and deliverable. Our template manages the scale and scope of a brainstorm session by filtering and organizing the session through 3 phases of progression. By applying 3 modes of ideation thinking: divergent, emergent, and convergent, each phase becomes more concise and therefore, more decisive thoughts/ideas emerge as a result of varying levels of rationale.

How we built it

First, we brainstormed and drew our designs via wireframes and mockups, then re-iterated them again and again through user flows, information architecture, personas, and UX research. After, we designed our template via Whiteboards for Jira and finalized design decisions by utilizing feedback and suggestions.

Challenges we ran into

Our team had to understand how to use Whiteboards for Jira first before we could actually start creating a template. It was a learning curve attempting to use the platform, but after a while we got the hang of it. In addition to learning how to navigate through the Whiteboard platform, it was a challenge trying to think of how users may use the template with ease. This is why we wound up adding instructions and guides along the way for teams to always know what should be doing. We wanted to focus on making the template user-friendly without any confusion.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team, we're proud of how we organized the content of the template to be designed in a user-centric way. We created this template with hopes of making it easy to understand by any type of user who wants to take their team into a remote ideation session. Ultimately, we love how the template turned out visually and function-wise.

What we learned

While we were working through the template, we found that overthinking concepts only made things confusing. Initially, we drew out wireframes of what our template could look like and followed with the design afterwards, this helped us focus on the content and flow of the template.

What's next for Ideation Mapping

Ideation mapping can always be built upon, but we rather kept it simple and easy to use for the sake of our first template. We hope to not confuse teams but encourage team building through this sort of brainstorming method. We hope that Jira users will enjoy using our Ideation Mapping template.

Built With

• jira-whiteboard
• product-design
• ux/ui