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Analogous Inspiration Exercise
The Analogous Inspiration Exercise is a great tool for thinking up new ideas and helps you find inspiration in non-related fields.
The best ideas come when we're out of our comfort zone
Use this worksheet as an ideation facilitator during a strategy or user research workshop. An analogous inspiration worksheet creates a product experience similar to finding the right cable in a messy drawer.
As this exercise can lead people out of their comfort zone, ensure to warm up the participants with an icebreaker exercise. You need them to develop radical ideas for the activity to succeed!
Picking the "right" experiences
Step three is by far the trickiest part of this exercise. As a facilitator, your job is to try and lead workshop participants towards some situations they wouldn't usually encounter at work.
For example, if you're trying to come up with some new features ideas for a car dealership website, you don't want people to list "buying a new car safely" as an example of feeling confident about something. You might want to prompt them to think of other times they felt confident. What about "fixing the broken washing machine without needing help"?
The more unlikely your madlib statement is, the higher the chance your idea will be great.
"The goal of this exercise is to create unusual connections between elements you wouldn’t normally connect. The further away from your product’s area, and devices you can go, the easier it will be to think of radical ideas."
Anna Scandella
Director of User Experience
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Founded in 2012, Pocketworks and has grown to 19 people across five European countries. Our clients hire us as a long-term partner, assisting them with their mobile strategy, market research, user research, design, mobile development, cloud development, quality assurance and mobile growth hacking.
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