Analogous Inspiration

TIME

30-60 minutes

DIFFICULTY

Moderate

WHAT YOU’LL NEED Pens, paper, camera

PARTICIPANTS

Design team, contact in the analogous setting

To get a fresh perspective on your research, shift your focus to a new context.

IDEO.org teams are often led by their intuition to take creative leaps. It may feel silly to visit an Apple store when you’re designing for those living in difficult circumstances, but you may unlock the key to a memorable customer experience or a compelling way to arrange products. Analogous settings can help you isolate elements of an experience, interaction, or product, and then apply them to whatever design challenge you’re working on. Besides, getting out from behind your desk and into a new situation is always a great way to spur creative thinking.

STEPS

01 On a large sheet of paper, list the distinct activities, behaviors, and emotions you’re looking to research.

02 Next to each one, write down a setting or situation where you might observe this activity, behavior, or emotion. For example, if the activity is “use a device at the same time every day,” parallel situations might be how people use alarm clocks.

03 Have the team vote on the site visits that they would like to observe for inspiration and arrange for an observation visit.

04 When you make your visit, pay close attention to what it is you want to understand, but remain open to all kinds of other inspiration.

METHOD IN ACTION

Analogous Inspiration

As part of a three-month engagement to increase mobile money use in Ghana, IDEO.org partnered with Tigo, a telecommunications company, and the World Bank’s Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). The design team’s goal was to help our partners improve their existing mobile tools enabling both increased customer activity and service adoption. Improving the reach of these tools among low-income communities would provide better access to formal money management opportunities and reach those who are typically unbanked.

During the Inspiration phase, the team started to hear a few ideas again and again. They realized that for unbanked Ghanaians, there was quite a bit of value for consumers in seeing a visible community of users of whatever product or service they designed.

As the team delved deeper into what visible community meant, it sought analogous examples. By examining other visible communities, like Arsenal Football Club fans in England, Lyft drivers in the United States, and Catholics celebrating Ash Wednesday, the team fleshed out an insight that ultimately drove the design. By the end of the project, the notion that visible community could drive adoption was a key piece of the research, and it wouldn’t have had the same depth if the design team hadn’t dug into other visible communities to understand what makes them tick. As the team’s research around visible community got deeper, they came to see that evidence of participation, public displays of identity, and support from the community were keys to a successful solution.

When you’re identifying analogous examples, try to drill down to your core insights. What characteristics are you exploring? Instead of trying to come up with one analogy to match everything that your design challenge encompasses, try thinking about it in terms of its components.

Arsenal Football Club fans (top), Catholics on Ash Wednesday (bottom right), and the American car service Lyft (bottom left) all provided Analogous Inspiration for a team working to understand visible communities.