Overview

A white infinity loop with the Make phase of design thinking highlighted.

At this point, your team should have some ideas for the points of inefficiency, confusion, and pain that you can address. It's time to start "Making," or creating prototypes of possible solutions!

In the Making part of the loop, you:

define the problem,
ideate, and
prototype options.

There are several tools to start the Making process. Below, we have outlined four such tools that flow sequentially, each building off of the results of the previous process. For your assignment, your team will be required to complete a big idea vignette and a Hills statement.

To explore these tools, scroll down or click the links below.

Big Idea Vignette
Prioritization and Impact by Feasibility Grids
Storyboarding
Hills Statements

Big Idea Vignette

Big idea vignettes are a method to ideate using the insights gained from empathy maps and as-is scenario activities. Big idea vignettes allow your team to come up with ideas quickly - even if they are absurd - to start ideating on solutions. Recall the page about Design Thinking and Collaboration, where we explained the importance of teamwork and building trust; that is critical to enable the sharing of big ideas.

Diverge and Converge

Big idea vignettes are most effective when using the Diverge and Converge technique introduced in the Design Thinking and Collaboration page.

Big idea vignettes can be created:

in-person with sticky notes and markers, or
remotely using free online tools.

Diverge

To create a big idea vignette, each team member begins by "diverging," or working on their own, to generate three or more ideas that address the user's pain points and improve areas of inefficiency or confusion. Team members then make a "vignette", or small drawing, to showcase the idea. The vignettes should be simple, without too much detail. You don't need to be an artist - you just need to get the idea across! On a sticky note or virtual text box, write a one sentence description to explain the vignette.

Drawing vs. Writing Text

You may be thinking, “I don’t have time to draw pictures! Why should I draw when I can more easily write key words?” Drawing actually activates both sides of our brain – the right side for the creative act of drawing, and the left side for logical, analytical thinking. This can inspire deeper creativity and a more nuanced understanding of your topic. By illustrating your vignettes, you are also allowing other people to interpret your ideas, which in turn might spark new ideas or different analyses. This can further enrich your ideas and lead you to better solutions (Broudieu, 2020)! If you're interested, learn more about how sketching can benefit your design practice.

Absurd Ideas

As an additional exercise, we encourage team members to generate one or more (so-called) "absurd ideas", which can break the laws of physics. The reason for this is to free each team member from self-imposed constraints. By focusing on the goal alone and not worrying about feasibility, team members often approach the problem through a different lens and generate more creative ideas. While absurd ideas are just ideas, it can be surprising at how often they lead to practical solutions.

Converge

Next, each team member plays back, or shares, each of their ideas with the rest of the team. The "playback" for each idea should be no longer than 15 or 20 seconds. Keep it high-level and focused on the concept, not the implementation. It's important that each team member reads and understands each other's ideas and ask questions about them.

When all team member playbacks are complete, the team should then "remix" similar ideas together and highlight unique ones. Now, you should "converge" your ideas to have a variety of options to address your persona's pain points (from feeling), points of inefficiency (from doing), and points of confusion (from thinking).

Online Tools for Big Idea Vignettes

The best way to facilitate big idea vignettes is through whiteboard programs, like Mural, Weje, and Whiteboard Fox. Most whiteboard programs provide the ability to use "sticky notes" and use the "draw" tool to sketch out basic ideas. You may also be able to import images from the web to capture your big idea, depending on the program.

Celia's Big Idea Vignette

Celia has reflected on her user Adrianna's experience, as well as the empathy maps she created earlier, and has identified a few big ideas that she can incorporate in her solution. All of the ideas below are based on the persona's (Adrianna's):

points of confusion,
points of inefficiency, and
pain points.

To make her vignettes, Celia used pen and paper to draw some sketches and then uploaded the images to Mural to create the captions.

Prioritization and Impact by Feasibility Grids

At this stage, your group will have a lot of ideas and it will become important to prioritize them.

A good way to prioritize the big ideas is to vote on two attributes:

the importance or impact to the persona, and
the feasibility of implementation (which can be time, money, effort, etc.).

Prioritizing can be done effectively as a team by voting.

Votes for Impact and Votes for Feasibility

To facilitate the voting, each team member gets a certain number of votes that can be used for impact, and a certain number of votes to be used for feasibility.

For example, if you are working in person, perhaps each team member gets:

six star-shaped stickers to indicate votes for impact, and
six circle-shaped stickers to indicate votes for feasibility.

If you are working remotely, you could use digital stickers on a white-boarding program, or the digital "draw" tool to indicate voting choices. The important thing to note is that there are two types of votes (impact and feasibility), and each team member should get an equal number of both types of votes.

Online Tools for Impact by Feasibility Grids

As impact by feasibility grids are a common tool in design thinking, there are templates available to help you get started. Mural is a great option; note that in Mural, this tool is referred to as an "Assumption Grid." FreeHand, akin to Mural, is also an option for your team when working remotely.

Voting Considerations

The most important part of the prioritization activity is to assess which of the team's big ideas are most important and most feasible within a given release or planning period. Diverge and evaluate each big idea on your own. Vote for the ones that are most important and feasible.

Refer to the table below for sample considerations to keep in mind when you are voting.

Table: Voting Considerations
Sample impact or importance considerations	Sample feasibility considerations
Does it turn a pain point into a delight? Does it expand user value? Does it differentiate the product and make it stand out?	Can we do this as a team? Can we take this to the market? Is it technically feasible?

Below is an image that shows what the voting may look like. The gold stars indicate votes for impact, and the blue dots indicate votes for feasibility.

Six sticky notes with "Idea" written on each one, and different number of votes of stars and blue dots

Impact by Feasibility Grid

After the votes are counted, it can be helpful to plot them on an impact by feasibility (or prioritization) grid.

This provides an effective way to visualize the relevant impact and feasibility of each big idea. Use this information to select the main "big idea cluster" (or two, or at most three clusters, if they are similar) on which to focus your solution. The impact by feasibility grid includes "impact / importance to user" on the vertical axis, and "feasibility" on the horizontal axis. Plot all the ideas according to the axes and relative to each other.

Feasibility Grid image

In reviewing the grid, you will likely notice clusters of ideas. These can be organized into categories, depending on their feasibility and impact scores.

There should be some high impact and high feasibility clusters in the top right quadrant. These ideas have a high impact on the user and are easy to implement. This clearly indicates where your team should first focus its time and energy when developing a solution.
You will also find some options in the top left quadrant that are high impact, but difficult to implement. These might be hard to carry out but will be very valuable to users if you choose to pursue them and are successful in doing so.
If any ideas fall into the bottom right quadrant, they are easy to implement but not highly valuable to the user experience. Your team can choose to implement these or not; it will depend on where you want to focus your resources.
Lastly, if an idea falls in the bottom left quadrant of the grid, it is both difficult to implement and will have low impact on the user. These are the types of ideas to stay away from, as there is very little value in developing them.

While you won't be asked to submit an impact by feasibility grid as a part of your module deliverable, creating one will help your team define the solution for your SI Challenge. To better understand how to use this tool, refer to Celia's example below.

Activity: Celia's Impact by Feasibility Grid

Celia developed a lot of great ideas in the big idea vignette activity, and now is excited to plot them on an impact by feasibility grid to identify where she should focus her resources for the possible solution.

Instructions:

Drag and drop the sticky notes onto the grid, based on how many votes they received for Impact (gold stars) and Feasibility (blue dots), then click the blue "Check" button.

Storyboarding

After your team has decided on the idea cluster(s) to focus on, it's time to storyboard. Storyboarding allows your team to illustrate the solution or product with the user in mind, prompting feedback and critical discussion about the weaknesses and opportunities for improvement (Design Thinking Methods Catalogue, n.d.). This feedback allows your team to re-iterate on the design, improving those weaknesses and making the end-product more effective and user-friendly.

Storyboarding Process

For the storyboarding process, the Diverge and Converge structure works well. Team members initially work separately and, once every team member has one or more storyboards to share, return to the full group to explore everyone's ideas.

To make a storyboard, you can use simple drawings, graphics, images, or collages as well as captions or narration to augment the visuals. It's important to include a beginning, middle, and end to your story. It's common to use six panels with each frame featuring a sketch/image and a narration.

Your storyboard should include big idea vignettes previously generated by the team to improve upon your as-is scenario. Ensure that each frame is still high-level and conceptual and doesn't go into implementation-level details. It's designed to be a compelling story about your persona and, as such, it should have a happy ending!

When writing out your storyboard, be sure to focus on the user experience, especially the emotional implications as one uses your product or design. For example, as you imagine the user going through the new experience you've created, can you identify moments of confusion, frustration, annoyance, or nervousness? These are weaknesses in the design and elements that your team could improve as you continue the design process.

When all team members have storyboards drafted, come together and share your ideas. As a team, choose the best pieces from each storyboard to "remix" into a single team master storyboard. The best ideas will be the ones that deeply consider the users, including the implications of your design on their experiences. It's okay if this master storyboard goes over six panels. The final storyboard should tell a story of possibilities and get colleagues and stakeholders excited about how you can improve the life of your persona.

Best Practices in Storyboarding

Here are some best practices for creating effective storyboards:

Tell a seamless story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Imagine your story with characters, a plot, conflict, and resolution.
Keep your storyboard human-centred by focusing on the user.
Think "comic book". Use speech and thought bubbles, action bursts, captions, symbols, and narration.

Online Tools for Storyboarding

Mural and Freehand have templates to assist with the storyboarding process. Your team could also choose a more general whiteboarding program, such as Weje or Whiteboard Fox, to create storyboards.

Your SI Challenge Storyboard

Depending on your idea(s), storyboarding could take anywhere from 30 minutes to multiple hours to complete. For the purposes of your SI Challenge, we recommend spending about 30 minutes on this activity.

Check out Celia's storyboard for inspiration.

Celia's Storyboard

Now that Celia has a good understanding of her ideas and where to focus her resources, she can create a storyboard for her big solution idea: an automated appointment booking system that allows users to input symptoms and receive a prescription or a referral to a doctor in the case of a severe ailment.

To this end, Celia has prepared a storyboard to illustrate the user experience for such a product, incorporating her big ideas above. Instead of using pen and paper, Celia decided to use PowerPoint to bring her ideas together. She used ClipArt and open-source images to illustrate her ideas.

Hills Statements

Now that we have a story fleshing out the selected big idea cluster(s), it's important to capture the objective or goal of the story as a Hills statement.

Recall that the Hills statement is one of the three keys introduced in the first part of this module. It is important to create the Hills statement only after going through the Observing and Reflecting stages, as well as after ideating and prioritizing your team's big ideas. Doing so provides deeper insights into the user's experience, increases opportunities for empathy, and enhances your team's understanding of the problem you are seeking to solve. This allows you to be more specific with your Hills statement, as this will guide you through the rest of your development process.

Blank template for Hills statements with three columns: Who, What, and Wow

The Hills statement describes the desired end state experience that your users will have by focusing on the Who, What, and Wow:

Who are your users? Make it clear who you aim to serve - and who you don't.
What is the need your users are trying to meet? Turn user needs into project goals.
Wow - a description of your user's experience or ideal end state. How will you differentiate your solution from competitors? How will you determine success (Oluyemi, 2020)?

A good way to build a Hills statement is to have all team members write their recommendations for the who, what, and wow into three columns. In other contexts, Hill statements may be known as "How might we statements"; for example: How might we use X to perform Y function, so that Z can be achieved?

Then, have each team member vote on the who, what, and wow they think is most appropriate. Write out the resulting elements into a full sentence or two. This is your Hills statement. You will submit one Hills statement for your SI Challenge, based off your big idea vignette.

Continue below for an example of a Hills statement that Celia has crafted. This may inspire you when creating a Hills statement with your team. For more examples of Hills Statements, check out the IBM website and this Medium article.

Online Tools for Hills Statements

Mural can be a good option for creating a Hills statement, along with any of the whiteboard programs mentioned in the Additional Resources: Online Tools for Design Thinking page. You may also choose to use Trello for a fast and efficient approach to complete this activity.

Celia's Hills Statement

Celia with her hand up pointing as if to say, "Aha!"

Below is the Hills statement that Celia created for the IMAGINE Clinic.

She has a separate sticky note for:

Who the users are,
What they will be able to do, and
The "Wow!" factor.

Three sticky notes appearing under headings.

Who - All patients of the IMAGINE Clinic

What - Can book an appointment, and/or get other help for their sympotoms

Wow - Without having to speak to a human being

References

Broudieu, M. (2020, May 20). How sketching can benefit your design practice. UX Collective. https://uxdesign.cc/there-is-always-a-good-reason-to-draw-why-sketching-benefits-your-design-practice-fd0c7e43c2c8

Design Thinking Methods Catalogue. (n.d.). Storyboard. https://designthinking-methods.de/en/4Prototypen/storyboard.html

Oluyemi, N. (2020, May 7). What are Hills in IBM design thinking? Medium. https://nife.medium.com/what-are-hills-in-ibm-design-thinking-446315959774