INSIGHTS
The mindset of sharing insights is to motivate people with great stories. Your raw learnings need to be distilled and brought to life. Insights are concise expressions that help make your observations, interviews and empathy experiences actionable. Each one should feel like a mini revelation, make you sit up and pay attention.
– Source: Workshop to cluster interview results into an 'Affinity Diagram' ALStarr75
Powerful insights fuel innovation...
How do you know you have an insight? Insights should be...
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Authentic, supported by learnings of real people
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Non-obvious, news you can use rather than something someone would immediately think of when describing the subject
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Revealing, offering a glimpse into how people think or feel
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Tips for crafting a good insight, they should...
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Inform – sheds light on what people need and want
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Inspire – motivates you to feel / do something
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Memorable – phrased in a way that will stick with you and is easy to share with others
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Remember, insights don’t just appear, they have to be crafted, and good insights fuel innovation
Steps for summarizing insights...
Narrow down and make sense of it all
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A good way to think about crafting insights is to think about constellations. At first it looks like you have hundreds of individual stars. Then group those stars into constellations. The next step is to give the constellation a name and add a story.
– Source: Insights for innovation IDEO-U
Similarly we share insights by connecting non-obvious data points that come together into a compelling story.
Capture, connect, craft and tell...
Capture – Individual data points
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Capture stories from your observations, interviews, empathy exercises and learning from extremes – write down the most interesting things you noticed, one story / idea per post-it note.
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Connect – them together in meaningful ways
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Look for topics that emerge and repeat from note to note. Collect these together to form themes and give each theme a name.
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Use dot stickers here to highlight key stories / ideas, the ones that represent ah-ha! moments or ones that are most interesting, surprising or confusing.
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Craft – insights to share with others
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Write and re-write your themes into insights that inform, inspire and are memorable. You can illustrate themes with a particular story or quote.
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You can share them with others to see what is resonating or where you need to try again.
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Story Tell – through words and visuals
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Insights are brought to life more vividly with photographs and drawings to help round them out. They are great story telling prompts that help create texture and context.
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You know you are doing it right if at the end, you and your team feel something that makes you want to make things better for people.
– Source: Example of an insight crafted for a project around children reading ALStarr75
It's time to generate ideas, ideas, ideas...
Your insights alongside your personas give you the perfect fuel for the ideation stage of your project, you understand the problems to solve, you are focused on real human needs and you have built empathy and consensus in your team.
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Why not read Design Thinking - Ideation >