Summary: Data from 257 UX professionals shows that quality UX ideas come from ideating early in the design cycle, drawing inspiration from user research, and working with a group. Many struggle with generating ideas because they lack time, managerial support, and a methodology for conducting effective ideation sessions.

Ideation processes can vary widely — from how many people are involved to what techniques are used. To get an understanding of how ideation is commonly approached, what the challenges are, and what methods are perceived as effective, we surveyed 257 UX-related professionals in a range of roles, including UX designers, developers, content strategists, visual designers, and product managers. Organization size ranged from fewer than 10 people to over 10k employees.

Effectiveness of Ideation

Only 15% of those surveyed felt that their ideation process was “very effective.” The largest group, 59% of respondents, considered their process as only “somewhat effective.” 8% were brave enough to admit their process is ineffective, about 1% weren’t sure, and a large 18% avoided answering the question entirely (I’m tempted to add this group into the “ineffective” category, because if you’re unwilling to answer the question, you probably just don’t want to admit it).

Ideation-Session Structure

Session length. 31% of the practitioners surveyed said that their group ideation sessions are typically 15 minutes to an hour long, and another 46% take between 1 to 3 hours — that’s 77% of people needing less than 3 hours to conduct an ideation session!

Number of participants in ideation sessions. Most of our respondents reported that they avoided large group sessions: 99% of them tend to ideate alone or in small groups of less than 8 people. This is no surprise, as large groups can easily become unwieldy and difficult to facilitate.

How many people should you include? You don’t need a large crowd to source a variety of ideas. 40% of practitioners typically ideate in a small group of 2 to 8 people, 34% ideate on their own, and another 25% conduct an even mix of ideation sessions with a group and individually.

Is individual ideation better than group ideation? When we compared “very effective” ideation teams with “somewhat effective” teams, we found that the “somewhat effective” segment contains a higher proportion of individual ideators (37%) than the “very effective” set (18%). This difference is statistically significant (p=0.05).

This finding corroborates the 66% of respondents who stated that group ideation is more effective at generating high-quality design ideas than working alone. Those with very effective idea-generation processes collaborate more often and rely less on individual ideation — they practice what they preach.

Including more people in your ideation process can generate a much wider set of ideas than you could produce individually, because it allows you to draw on many diverse perspectives. Whenever possible, aim to include at least one other person in your ideation process to be more effective at generating useful design ideas. A UX team of 1 may need to conduct multidisciplinary team meetings to generate a large variety of ideas. This isn’t to say that ideating alone can never be effective — just that you may need to work harder to force yourself to think divergently and fully explore the breadth of possible design solutions.

Ideation Challenges

A clear trend seen across this large set of responses was the agreement about challenges related to ideation. Here we discuss the most common complaints.

No Time!

After sifting through the open-ended responses to this question, the most common complaint (mentioned by 19% of respondents) was not having enough time to dedicate to ideation during project design cycles. People mentioned not only the lack of time for ideation per se, but also the inability to carry out user research to fully understand the user needs before ideating, and to follow up on ideas generated in ideation sessions.

“Too much pressure to pick a single design path quickly” “Agile engineering rhythm does not allow time for UX at any stage of product development cycle.” “Allocating an appropriate amount of time for design in a project's budget. In my experience, clients are more willing to pay for development than design (and particularly ideation).” “They give us too much other work to even think about it.”

While it isn’t surprising, it’s sad to see so many people struggling to gain adequate time for UX work because successful ideation doesn’t have to take much time. (After all, remember that 77% of respondents use less than 3 hours for an ideation session.)

When analyzing the length of typical sessions across teams who feel they have an effective ideation process, we did not find that these teams were spending more time on ideation compared with the other respondents. This shows that it’s not about how much time you dedicate to ideation; it’s about what you do during that time.

Lack of Managerial Support

Insufficient time in the project schedule for ideation and design exploration indicates weak or absent support from upper management and stakeholders. Indeed, lack of upper managerial support was the second most common complaint — 15% of our respondents mentioned this issue. Without this support, teams also struggle to persuade members of other teams to join them in ideation sessions.

“Lack of engagement by others in the organization. Lack of perceived value in the ideation phase. People are too busy.” “Getting time to do [ideation]. Getting stakeholders to understand why it’s important, so they give us time. Getting other team members (usually members with less/no "digital"/design/UCD experience BUT with domain knowledge) to understand why it’s important and why we need them to take part.” “Getting all involved parties (departments) at one table” “PEOPLE SAY THEY ARE TOO BUSY TO HELP!”

These sentiments echo our recent survey about UX processes as a whole, where UX professionals noted that UX receives less management support compared to other teams at their organizations. Particularly for ideation, top-level support and clout to pull people from various teams and roles into multidisciplinary meetings are critical for generating creative solutions that approach the design challenge from various perspectives.

Not Enough User Research

13% of respondents protested that they do not have enough time to conduct user research to set the context for ideation nor to test their ideas. This complaint is highly related to the overall issue of lacking time, resources, and managerial support.

Designating enough time for group ideation is important, but it’s perhaps more important to have adequate time to conduct user research. Without user research, even if you can generate a lot of ideas, there will be no guarantee that they will lead to usable designs, as these ideas would not be grounded in real user needs.

When they lack the time and budget to research and understand user needs, people tend to lean on their own assumptions to make design decisions. Without data, assumptions based on yourself seem like the best way to go — but you are not the user!

“Lack of user research leading to conflicting opinions” “Lack of knowledge and understanding of who we're designing for” “We don't always have a clear understanding of the requirements or the user's problem before designing.” “Creating a base of shared understanding before ideating”

I realize I’m likely preaching to the choir here, so I’ll keep this brief and just point to resources on how to make UX and Agile work together, ammunition showing you need to research users to be user-centered, and tips to build respect for UX.

Group-Dynamics Issues

The majority of respondents also acknowledged having experienced group-dynamics issues: 69% reported that at least some ideation sessions end with someone feeling angry, frustrated, self-conscious, or ignored. Although interpersonal issues can be difficult to overcome, conducting group sessions is so valuable that it is worth investing effort to troubleshoot group ideation issues.

When to Ideate?

When ideation occurs within the design process can be a large factor in its overall effectiveness. 32% of those surveyed don’t set aside any specific time for ideation. While this includes those who do not have the time to ideate at all, it also covers a fair number of instances where ideation isn’t being planned as a formalized part of the design process and thus may occur at any and all stages of the design process, including after prototyping and implementation have already begun. One respondent bemoaned this: “All of the above apply, it’s a mess.”

Among those who reported having a “very effective” ideation process, ideation occurs significantly more often at earlier stages of the design cycle, compared to those with only “somewhat effective” ideation. Most notably, 71% of “very effective” responders have ideation sessions after conducting user research, but before prototyping, compared to only 48% of the “somewhat effective” responders (this difference is statistically significant, p = .05).

Ideation does not have to only occur at one stage in the cycle, but earlier is better — once prototyping and implementation has begun, the design path is already fairly set and you won’t be able to take advantage of the divergent solutions that could have come out of ideation. It is much more effective to conduct ideation sessions before beginning to prototype any single solution.

Ideation Methods

The ideation methods used vary from organization to organization, and that’s a good thing! There is no one-size-fits-all approach to ideation, and practitioners should feel confident in adapting idea-generation techniques to best suit the current project.

Inspiration is drawn from many places, the most common being studying direct competitors (employed by 78% of respondents), talking to coworkers (76%), following relevant blogs (73%), studying organizations with similar challenges other than direct competitors (68%), and observing or conducting UX research (67%). It is worth noting that those who perceived their ideation process as very effective had the highest percentage of respondents gathering inspiration from UX research, with 74% of “very effective” respondents using this source, compared with the slightly lower 68% of “somewhat effective” respondents using UX research as inspiration, and a mere 45% of “ineffective” respondents turning to research.

The numbers in the above chart clearly sum to much more than 100%, indicating that people tend to use multiple sources for inspiration.

In regards to methods or techniques used to conduct ideation sessions, many respondents admit to having completely open-ended discussions when generating ideas, while less than half have used structured ideation techniques. I hesitate to say that an unstructured discussion is inherently bad, but I must point out that, of those who feel their ideation process is ineffective, 95% rely on unstructured discussions, with the next popular method being brainstorming at 28% of “ineffective” respondents. So, if generating a divergent set of innovative ideas is a struggle for your team, consider providing more structure to the idea-generation process by using a formal ideation technique.

Another intriguing difference among the use of ideation methods is related to written ideation techniques, such as “brainwriting” or other systems where people individually document their ideas before bringing them to the larger group. Those who perceive their ideation process as very effective engage in significantly more written ideation (40%) compared to those with only “somewhat effective” (20%) or “ineffective” (22%) idea-generation processes (p=0.05). Written techniques may lead to more effective idea generation by allowing all members in the ideation session to contribute ideas, while avoiding common group dynamics issues such as groupthink, unbalanced contributions (with certain people dominating the conversation and others not sharing at all), and even hierarchy bias if ideas are kept anonymous when evaluated.

The lack of designated facilitators may explain why so many resort to conducting unstructured discussions. When asked whether they typically have a chosen facilitator to run group-ideation sessions, almost half our survey respondents chose to avoid answering the question entirely! (Whether a facilitator is present in a meeting seems like something most people would be aware of, so it is unclear whether this group of non-responders would have fallen into the Not Sure, Never, or Sometimes categories but did not want to confess.) Of those who did respond, the majority only sometimes have a designated facilitator (23%), but at least more people always have a facilitator (17%) than those that never have one (12%).

Conclusion

Ideation as a step in the design process does not seem to be widely recognized across many organizations. Teams struggle with garnering management support to allow them the time for both user research and ideation sessions, and to get the level of multidisciplinary involvement needed to generate a wealth of diverse ideas. Teams that do manage to conduct short ideation sessions continue to struggle with group dynamics, managing the ideation sessions, and knowing which ideation methods to utilize at various stages of the design process. The bright side is that we all agree that ideation and a focus on generating diverse ideas will result in better designs. We just need the time and techniques to do it more effectively.

Here are the best practices that emerge from our study of very effective ideation in the UX design process:

Conduct ideation early in the design lifecycle.

Make sure that at least some of the ideation sessions involve several people.

Look to multiple sources of inspiration, and make sure to include user research as one of these.

Employ structured ideation techniques.

Use some amount of written ideation.

Have a designated facilitator.

Ideation sessions can be short (<3 hours), but for optimal success ideation does require a time budget and management support.

For more guidance on ideation, and applied practice using various structured techniques to improve idea generation, come to our Effective Ideation Techniques for UX Design full-day training course.