How do the ideas gathered during the research stages actually turn into a product? Conceptual design is where everything starts to come together.
The goal of this stage is to synthesise the insights and information gathered throughout your research and begin to mould these into a product your users will love.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a simple process and an ideal way to involve your entire team in the design of your product. Gather all group members into a room, give them 10 to 15 minutes to think about the product on their own, and then start sharing ideas as a group. Having key stakeholders participate in a brainstorming session is an ideal way to foster a sense of ownership and create buy-in for the project early on.
While brainstorming can generate some crazy ideas, it’s a great starting point because it can free your group from worrying
about details. There will be plenty of time for the details later.
Be sure to arrange a facilitator for the group. This person will help guide the session, ensure the conversation doesn’t get mired in details, and take notes — preferably on a whiteboard or large-format paper.
Sketching
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Brainstorming often generates similar ideas from different participants. That’s OK. Divide all the ideas by their basic themes, pick the ones that sound best to your team, and start working through each idea by doing some simple sketches. Sketching is quick, anyone can do it, and it’s a great way to experiment and explore ideas. The following video provides a short introduction to brainstorming, sketching, and the conceptual-design process. |
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When is a sketch not just a sketch?
One of the great benefits of sketching is that it enables you to quickly depict ideas visually. Yet sometimes you may need a more polished drawing to get your ideas across.
Technical sketches are useful to illustrate and explain how something could work ‘on the inside’. They are also ideal to show how elements fit together. In UI design, the most common types of technical sketches illustrate the breakdown of user interface components — especially those in flexible UIs.
Presentation sketches are more refined than conceptual sketches and usually are created for stakeholder presentations. These sketches explain the product in greater detail than technical sketches do. They can also include preliminary visual design to inspire and help capture the mood or feel of the product.
Figure 1: These examples illustrate the levels of detail and refinement in various types of sketches.
Nokia provides Visual Toolkits to help you create your UI mock-ups.
Download the UI Toolkit for N9
Download the Series 40 Web App Graphics UI Toolkit
UI Toolkit for Symbian
Defining scenarios
Simply put, scenarios are stories describing a set of circumstances that may occur when your product is in use. Most scenarios revolve around your user’s accomplishing a particular task, so describe the interactions between that person and the product from beginning to end. Your collection of scenarios should ideally include an example of each major interaction you believe your users will have or should have with your product.
Scenarios can aid product development in many ways. Scenarios:
- Help team members empathise with the user.
- Bring the product to life through storytelling.
- Enable developers to carefully examine when, why, and how a user may make decisions about a task.
- Help uncover hidden relationships between tasks.
- Provide a reality check: Would users really do this? What might they do next, and why?
Below is a sample scenario for a location-based application designed for smartphones. A scenario can consist of just a few written paragraphs, but don’t be afraid to add sketches, photos, or diagrams to bring the scenario to life.
It’s early Saturday evening. Satu has been shopping all day and is hungry. She glances at the Food Finder widget on her mobile phone’s home screen. The mini-view widget is displaying a sushi restaurant 10 metres away, but Satu is in the mood for a burger. She opens the widget and chooses ‘American’ from the menu. Success! There’s a branch of her favourite organic-burger eatery nearby.
Satu taps the ‘guide me’ button. A map opens, showing directions to the restaurant. With another button, she can quickly share restaurant directions by e-mail or social networking service. Eating alone is no fun, so Satu shares her plans via social network. Luckily, some of her friends are nearby, and when she reaches the restaurant, they’re already waiting for her.
But these are imaginary stories. How can they help?
While scenarios are imaginary, they’re ideal to get you thinking about how you would like your product to work. Scenarios
will help you both evaluate your product ideas and empathise with your personas as you imagine how they’ll interact with your
product.
As you continue to develop the product and determine how things will actually work, certain scenarios may no longer make sense, but that’s OK. The point of scenarios is to challenge each new idea or feature with the questions whose answers will matter most for your users: ‘How would that work?’ and ‘Why should my users care?’
If you find that scenarios are hard to create, seem convoluted, or are being challenged by team members, your product idea
may benefit from additional brainstorming and conceptual design.
Are we done yet?
The goal of conceptual design is to synthesise your business goals, your initial ideas, and the information gathered from your research into a firm and commercially viable product idea. It’s up to you how long this takes, how many scenarios you create, and how much time you spend sketching out ideas. When you think you’re done, ask yourself these questions:
- Do my scenarios make sense? Would a real person behave that way?
- Are we confident that we’ve clearly defined who our product is for and why they will use it?
- How will our product differ from that of the competition?
- Do we have a general understanding of how we’ll market this product?
- Are there any open questions that could affect the feasibility of the project?
Once you can look at your concepts, scenarios, and suggested product features and answer ‘yes’ to most of these questions, you’re probably ready to start working through the detailed product design.
Resources
You can expand and refine scenarios for presentation to stakeholders or the media. This conceptual video from Nokia demonstrates a hypothetical scenario for ’mixed reality’ products and services.
Nokia’s downloadable UI Toolkits are full-colour and can be used to create quick mock-ups or more-refined concepts for presentations to stakeholders.
Download the UI Toolkit for N9
Download the Series 40 Web App Graphics UI Toolkit
UI Toolkit for Symbian
