The Diverge phase gives people on the team space to digest the information and brainstorm on their own, allowing for ideas to be formed without being hindered by others’ opinions. Our goal is to explore as many ideas as possible, all from different perspectives and approaches, regardless of how unfeasible or untraditional they may be - it may happen that one person's idea could spark another, or contribute to someone else's idea. Also, once we begin eliminating some of these options in the next phase, we are given reason to be more confident, since we'll have explored so many alternatives.
- Have a mindset of "Yes" and constantly ask “How might we?”
The team should familiarize themselves with each persona's goals, tasks, and key questions, as these are what will lay the groundwork for the Diverge phase.
Each team member should organize their ideas on either paper, whiteboard, or Sketch -- whatever works best for sharing and discussion.
It may be difficult to automatically transition into ideation mode, which is why it's helpful to do a creative warm-up that'll get the team to start thinking divergently.
Before sketching ideas, each individual can search online for visualization examples that answer similar business questions. It may help to have a reference of different chart types (such as the Data Viz Catalogue), or to scroll through inspiring examples on The Pudding and Data Sketches.
A warm up exercise to start generating ideas. People are given time to individually explore the problem however they choose to.
The team should use the key questions and tasks as prompts for brainstorming different chart options. After a first round of brainstorming multiple charts to answer individual questions, try to combine similar questions to inspire more complex visualizations. At the end of this method, there could be multiple solutions for each task.
Borrowed from Google Ventures’ book, Sprint, this exercise, each member takes a sheet of printer paper, folds it in half 3 times to get 8 rectangles. They then have 5 minutes to sketch out ideas for a specific feature or flow in a product. After they’re done, they share with the team.
One of the 3 methods - Brainstorm, Crazy 8's, Affinity mapping - should be required.
- Exploratory research
- Mind mapping
- Brainstorm
- Crazy 8’s