Brainstorm Ideas
Once you have a project team formed, you need to consider what to design.
You should choose something that:
- Everyone on the team will find interesting,
- Will allow everyone on the team to grow their knowledge and skills,
- Demonstrates the concepts that we will discuss in the course,
- Could actually be a compelling and useful application for someone!
Steps
Here’s the activities we suggest. Any of these, or some combination of them, can lead to a great product idea.
Step 1: Discuss personal goals
We recommend starting with an open discussion with your team:
- Talk about your goals for the course. For example, if you’re interested in learning about a particular technology e.g., database or user interfaces, this might be a good opportunity to explore that.
- Talk about interests. Do you have similar hobbies? Similar problems that you all encounter? e.g., you all workout, or bike, or find scheduling study time difficult… Look at your own interests or community interests for problems to solve.
Successful teams leverage both of these points: they build something that everyone finds interesting, and divide the work up in a way that lets everyone achieve their goals. IMO this can provide a fantastic experience and result in an outstanding project.
Step 2: Identify opportunities
Think about your project from the perspective of market opportunities. What problems exist that haven’t been adequately addressed?
- Brainstorm, let everyone throw out ideas, no matter how outrageous.
- Expand and build on one another’s ideas. Take the time to explore a chain of ideas fully.
Brainstorming like this is much harder approach than “building something you find interesting”.
- Don’t expect to have a “million dollar idea” jump out from these discussions.
- We often get very creative ideas from teams that brainstorm like this.
Step 3: Examine competing solutions
Look at existing applications in the same domain that you are considering e.g., if you want to build something related to exercising and weight-lifting, you might start by examining the existing products.
- What do they do well?
- From the perspective of an end-user, are they missing anything critical?
- Think about problems in that space - are they any unsolved?
Be careful when doing this; you don’t want to clone someone else’s design entirely. Focus on finding some original features or need that is unmet and make that a key focus of your product.
Make sure to identify the need first, and the solution second so that you’re not just blindly-copying someone else’s design and ideas.