What you need

• Post-it Notes/papers and pens

• Ideas you’ve complied with your team from your ideation session

• The team you’ve ideated with

• 20 – 30 minutes

Introductions

After you are done ideating, you might end up with a ton of Post-it Notes, and personal comments from all directions.

This tutorial will guide you through creating a rational system for your team to help unify and discard ideas until you bring it down to just one that fits the aspects of the project.

Steps

Get back to your brief and extract all the different criterias that your project needs to meet. This list should only include elements asked by your client or from the brief, never from personal opinions (e.g.: innovative, easy to produce, useful for our audience, etc). 

Write each criteria on a Post-it Note in a question format that can be solved with a yes/no answer (e.g.: is it innovative?) and align them in a row on a flat surface. Now, write each idea on a Post-it Note and put them at the beginning of the row.

One by one, try to answer the criteria. If you answer is positive, jump to the next question. If your answer is negative, propose changes to make it positive or discard the idea.

When you are done, sum up all the changes on a new Post-it Note, explaining the final idea.

Pro-tip

We advise you to have the list of criteria ready before starting your ideation phase. In that way you can avoid personal bias or hidden agendas when writing it.