Brainstorming sessions

Discussion articles

• Brainstorming
  "Brainstorming is an individual or group process for generating alternative ideas or solutions for a specific topic. Good brainstorming focuses on the quantity and creativity of ideas: the quality of ideas is much less important than the sheer quantity. After ideas are generated, they are often grouped into categories and prioritized for subsequent research or application."
  (UPA - Usability Book of Knowledge)

• Brainstorming sessions
  A brainstorming session occurs within the preparation phase of site visits. It helps the project team to come to a common understanding of the domain. Through sketching the main role's workflow you can clearly recognise what information is missing and needs to be gathered in the site visit interviews. This session provides a basis for setting a focus and creating questions for the site visits.

• Brainstorming technique for problem-solving, team-building and creative process
  Brainstorming with a group of people is a powerful technique. Brainstorming creates new ideas, solves problems, motivates and develops teams. Brainstorming motivates because it involves members of a team in bigger management issues, and it gets a team working together. However, brainstorming is not simply a random activity. Brainstorming needs to be structured and follow brainstorming rules.

• How to run a brainstorming meeting
  The most important thing about a brainstorming session is what happens after it ends. No matter how poorly you run a brainstorming meeting, some decent ideas will surface. But depending on what happens after the session, those ideas may or may not impact anything. So while you can read books and take courses on better brainstorming techniques, the most important thing is figuring out how the brainstorming session fits into the larger decision making process you or your team has. Even if you fix how you run the meeting itself, and get better ideas, if you can’t migrate them into the decision making process for the project, what’s the point? With this central point in mind, the following essay covers how to run brainstorming sessions in a way that is most likely to be effective afterwards.

• Rules for productive brainstorming sessions
  Brainstorming sessions tend to be more productive if they follow some basic rules.