The act of brainstorming is so important especially for us as UX designers as it helps us to solve UX issues and create exceptional user experiences. This is because brainstorming allows us to collaborate with others to generate ideas rapidly or build upon existing thoughts or ideas. It also really encourages us to not constrain our thinking, providing us with the opportunity to create more diverse perspectives and gain more unique insights to help us build a suitable solution.

I personally feel that brainstorming is a valuable tool as it allows me to openly communicate what I think with my peers as well as hear their ideas and thoughts. This overall technique allows for me to improve my user experience to my projects and create better solutions.

Brainstorming Ideas

To start of this module we brainstormed ideas for how we can make the Apollo 11 mission interesting and engaging for all audiences, with a stronger emphasis of how younger people would find the information engaging.

Through this we were able to identify that as a class the most popular ways of keeping users engaged is through games, animations or technologies such as VR.

My personal favourite ideas from this brainstorm task was animation videos as I think they are really engaging and relatable for younger audiences or using technology such as VR to enter users into the experience through a flight simulator to the moon.

Reverse Brainstorming

We then did a reverse brainstorming, a creative approach which involved us identifying ways in which we could either cause or worsen a problem. This is a really fun technique to use as it is engaging and often results in some mad answers as well as help highlight potential problems which we can solve.

We were posed with the following questions:

• How might you make the Apollo Program uninteresting to a younger audience?
• How could you discourage interactive learning about the Apollo Program?
• How could we make historical space exploration seem irrelevant to todays society?
• How could we create a negative perception of space history?

This was a really engaging way to pinpoint ways that we could make the Apollo Program more engaging as we highlighted things such as the conspiracies that they never actually went to the moon, the negativity that came alongside it and the dangers of space travel as shown from previous tragedies. It also allowed us to highlight lots of problems within content design, text and imagery which we can avoid to help create an engaging and interactive product such as not using lots of text, using no imagery or irrelevant imagery or not taking into consideration accessibility. Overall I really enjoyed this brainstorming task and it gave me a lot to take away and think about.