Concept development might seem pretty straight forward; you’ve completed the user journey, interviewed them to learn their perspectives and conducted detailed brainstorming sessions. Now you’re ready to select the best ideas and build them into winning solutions that will fit within the creative brief (or project goals, business criteria, etc… ) before being unleashed upon your market.
But is it that simple?
As long as the right processes are followed, yes, it can be. But what are the steps and how can you ensure that your team follow them correctly? Let’s dive in.
Unlike brainstorming, concept development is an individual or core team project. While brainstorming, you and a larger team worked with blue sky thinking, listening to every idea and roughly evaluating how it could work within your project’s parameters, concept development is a solo endeavour. Developing concepts with a larger teams lacks the relevant context required to see the micro details which are required to fully build out a concept.
While your brainstorming sessions might have generated 100 ideas, only 10 made it out of the room for initial exploration, and ultimately three will survive for presentation to the key stakeholders down the road with only one surviving for execution in the marketplace. The ideas generated during the sessions are raw and incomplete – they’re the skeleton upon which the concept will be built upon. You’re now taking the most impressive ideas and combining them with the real world factors that your brand and company face based on the business criteria you have been tasked with solving.
This phase, while shorter than others, is critical in protecting great ideas from being cut too early, and to prevent you from getting caught up in the excitement that innovative ideas create; grounding your mind around the brief or business case that was the spark for this process.
The ideal time to start developing the concepts is once the brainstorming sessions are complete. With all the ideas still fresh and kicking around your mind, you’ll find that putting the proverbial meat on the bones of the idea is much easier when you can pull parts of other thoughts down to help fill out the winning ideas.
What you’re really doing when developing your concepts out is getting them ready for critical evaluation. While it is true that only one will survive, the winning idea will still be subject to more modification and revisions. During the concept development phase, you and your stakeholders will be evaluating the ideas against the brief or business criteria that started the project as a whole.
This helps reduce the risk of your project. When the C-Suite gets involved, they are quietly analyzing the risk factors in their mind. And of course, the more risk mitigation you are able to do in advance, the more comfortable the key stakeholders will be approving and advancing the project.
Concept Development in five steps:
Assemble your assets: Bring your core team (or yourself, you badass one nation army you), the design brief/business criteria and the winning brainstorming ideas together.
Spread it all out: Physically spread out your ideas and key points from the brief/criteria out on a table or wall. Sometimes we like to put the key requests or aspects of the brief on the wall as headlines yelling down at us to act as our North Star. This way we have lots of space to move ideas around, and still have our guiding principals nearby.
Start organizing: Now it’s time to organize the ideas. This is how we filter things:
- Group similar ideas together (this includes ad hoc or one-off ideas that didn’t fit the winners, but still hold value on their own).
- See what is missing and add in those ad hoc ideas, they could end up as the mortar around the idea bricks.
- Kick out any repetitive or redundant ideas that don’t ultimately service the problem being solved.
- Look for the themes that are now emerging and group the ideas around them;
- ‘Must have’ and ’nice to have’ from the brief
- Priorities from the brief
Identify themes: Select three to five pins that will hold each unique concept in place. Each pin will be circled by ideas that support and feed the concept. This way you and the team can start to see how each idea will form and how it relates back to the brief.
Build the concepts: Now you’re ready to develop some concepts! Drawing upon your learnings from Journey Mapping, User Interviews and Brainstorming and informed by the themes created, you can now start to build out the concepts that directly relate to the problem you’re trying to solve in a balanced and proportional way. Ultimately you’re picking and choosing elements that when combined create an incredible proposition for your customers and a strong repeatable or scalable business model that can carry you forward.
When it comes to concept development, spending the time to build out the right pieces that directly address the creative brief or business criteria beats the solo killer idea every time. Successful projects rarely evolve from random brainstorming sessions; they’re born from the disciplined processes of design thinking that is rooted in customer understanding and user experience.