Building For Everyone

CHAPTER 8Integrating Product Inclusion into the Ideation Process

The ideation process is the point at which you crystalize your ideas and understand what the core concept of your product or service will be—when team members start to brainstorm around how a product or service will come to life. During the ideation phase, you identify a potential solution for your target user, build on it, and solidify it before moving onto prototyping and testing.

Ideation is a key part of the new‐product development process because it's when everything begins for a product or service. This is the point prior to committing resources, defining a marketing strategy, and setting solid deadlines. Focusing on inclusion in this earliest stage of product development enables you to outline more clearly key process points where an inclusive lens is needed, thereby ensuring success while reining in unnecessary and avoidable costs. As with any other piece of your strategy and process, making changes is easier and less costly the earlier in the process it is identified. Bringing an inclusive lens to bear on your process during conception enables you to plan with inclusion in mind, thus optimizing business and user outcomes while minimizing costs and maximizing opportunities, while minimizing headaches if there are any.

In this chapter, I explain how to integrate inclusion into the ideation process by conducting design sprints (a five‐step team exercise for designing, prototyping, and testing new products) ...