Creating the Perfect App

Ideation is meant to be fun.

It’s a way to really get the brain running, ideas flowing, and creativity at its highest. And for a project about creating an app, being able to think of almost anything and everything is vital to being successful.

I’ll walk through some of the steps I took in my ideation exercise and what helped me bring some new ideas to light.

What is Ideation?

Ideation is great because it’s exactly what it sounds like.

Ideation is the process of creating ideas, as many as possible. By taking both your conscious and unconscious mind, you are able to combine them both to get both rational thoughts mixed with wild imagination.

But knowing what ideation is doesn’t mean you're good at creating ideas yet. What we need are some methods to help us along, and luckily, there are countless numbers to choose from.

There are so many ways to participate in the ideation process, from brainstorming and braindumping to challenging assumptions and sketching. All of these, though, aims to put you or a group in the headspace to generate ideas by letting you step back from the rigid structure of an overall project.

I’ll talk a little more about these methods in a bit, but let’s learn about what we’re going to be ideating about.

The App

In order to test my ideation skills, I thought of an app that would fit into my life, something that I am currently missing in my day-to-day life that could improve my daily routine.

And for me, that was Notable.

Notable is an all-in-one note, calendar, and reminder app meant to make your life simpler.

It takes all the best parts of what we need every day, from alarms to events to jotting down that quick idea in your head. It's meant to keep everything together, organized, and safe.

Bold idea? Probably right. But, in order to make it the perfect app possible, I need to generate some ideas.

What methods did I use?

It’s finally time to start ideating, and for this, I focused on two core methods: Worst Possible Idea and Brainstorming.

Worst possible idea is one of my favorites, as it makes absolutely no sense on the surface, but it works so well every time I use it.

The goal is to think of the worst idea you can. Usually, the worse, the better. Then, go through the ideas and try to understand why they are so bad and why they make no sense. Finally, you try to make a good idea based on that analysis.

Now lets look at what ideas I made off of this method.

I loved the ideas I came up with here. While not too complicated, they build upon already established concepts like notifications, checkups, and more, but give them a little twist that makes them feel unique.

I think we all need a calendar checkup, especially at work, as we can easily get bogged down by extraneous meetings that no longer need our attention.

While these are great, there are also other methods of ideation as well, such as brainstorming.

Most have done brainstorming in the past, as it's a very traditional way of creating ideas. Essentially, you write down any idea that comes to mind, then go through them all (whether individually or in a group) to find the most relevant and useful to your situation.

In my brainstorming session, I generated three ideas over three rounds, for a total of nine. I know these are much more hit-or-miss than the worst possible idea session, but that’s OK! The main point was just trying to think of anything that could solve or build out your project, and in many ways, this did.

Often, we can look towards the good ideas as action items, like the quick add feature or post-meeting notes, and run with them to see how they could work, while ideas like the widgets might be something sidelined or used to generate a new idea in the future.

With that, we’ve completed my ideation exercise, and now have a bunch of new concepts to potentially work with.

What did I learn?

After participating in these exercises, it’s clear why ideation is one of the critical parts of the design thinking process, if not the most important, as it gives us the opportunity to be unique.

Every method pushes us to think further and further outside the box, to the point where we even consider the worst ideas in order to find good ones. Even if you don’t utilize any of these methods and do your own thing, it's all just about being creative and finding that unique answer to a (usually) conventional problem.

For me, I love to be able to test out my ideation skills, even if I’m not usually the one solving the end problem, as it still helps me grow and find more answers to everyday problems.

So whether you are trying to create the next worldwide app or just thinking of ways to organize the fridge, give ideation a try and see what it can do for you.

Check out my full analysis below, or click here!