Brainstorming gives a team space to consider several responses before committing to one. It can bring different kinds of knowledge into the discussion, from operational constraints to observations about customers, provided the question is clear enough for those contributions to meet.

The ideas it produces are possibilities. Their number, novelty, or popularity in the room does not establish that people outside the room need them.

Frame a question with room for alternatives

A prompt such as “How could customers recover an unfinished application?” leaves more room than “What should the reminder email say?” The latter may be useful once email is the chosen approach, but it quietly excludes other responses if used too early.

Bring relevant research into the session and distinguish it from assumptions. In an illustrative application project, observations about lost progress, missing documents, and uncertainty about eligibility could suggest different directions. Avoid compressing those experiences into a vague statement that customers need more engagement.

IDEO.org’s brainstorming method encourages an open period of idea generation. A practical session can include individual thinking before discussion, giving people time to develop a contribution without competing for the next speaking turn.

Make participation and evaluation deliberate

Choose participants for the perspectives the question needs, and provide enough context for them to contribute. A quiet engineer may know why an apparently simple proposal has a serious dependency; a support colleague may recognise the language customers actually use.

Separate generating alternatives from assessing them, while making the transition explicit. Once the group begins evaluating, use criteria connected to the problem: likely benefit, evidence, feasibility, risks, and what could be learned next. Dot votes can show the room’s preference, but they do not convert that preference into customer evidence.

Keep distinct ideas intact long enough to examine them. Combining every suggestion into one large feature can remove the differences that made the alternatives worth considering.

Turn the selected idea into a question

Record why a direction was chosen and the assumptions behind it. A proposal to save drafts might depend on customers trusting that their progress is retained and being able to return from another device. Those assumptions give the next research activity a purpose.

Concept testing can explore whether the proposed experience makes sense, while prototype testing can examine a more tangible interaction. Sometimes another interview is needed before either is useful.

A productive brainstorm leaves the team with alternatives it understands and a way to investigate them. The wall of ideas is an intermediate record; the value develops when the team tests what the strongest possibilities would require.