What is one important step to take before ideation?

Before entering the ideation phase of a design process, empathizing with your user is a crucial step. This involves deeply understanding the needs, motivations, and pain points of the users for whom you are designing. By engaging with users through interviews, surveys, and observations, designers can gather valuable insights that inform their creative process.

Understanding the user perspective ensures that the ideas generated during ideation are grounded in real user experiences. This crucial foundation helps in developing solutions that are not only innovative but also relevant and user-centered, ultimately leading to better design outcomes. Empathy helps to create a shared understanding among team members about who the users are, which guides the ideation toward addressing actual user challenges instead of assumptions or generalized concepts.

This step significantly influences the effectiveness of the brainstorming sessions that follow, as participants are equipped with a rich understanding of the users’ context. Without this step, the ideation process risks producing ideas that may not resonate with or effectively solve the users’ problems, leading to wasted efforts and resources in developing solutions that do not meet user needs.