Step 4: Innovate Solutions

You are now ready to gather a group of people to start your user experience innovation process. You should focus your innovation effort on connections between your new application in the center and the other applications. It is in those in-between areas that you will find truly novel and potentially successful user experience innovations. But the target user needs are equally important and can be used as inspiration in the idea creation process.

During your innovation process, ideas will surely pop up that relate only to the application that you have in focus. You will also likely generate ideas for the other applications. It is important to also focus on how the applications may interact with others not in the diagram—in our case with other web services outside of our social community website. For this example, the result of the idea creation session could look like that shown in Figure 8-4.

Figure 8-4. Results of the innovation for the calendar application