As technology takes an increasingly personal role in the user’s life, gaining their insight during ideation has become increasingly valuable. Unfortunately, engaging with users, especially in the ideation process, often requires significant planning, time, and resources that may be difficult on projects with limited budgets. This suggests that more lightweight methods for generating ideas with users are needed. To help address this need, we developed a new design method we call “DesignLibs,” inspired by the children’s game Mad Libs™. DesignLibs helps designers generate new ideas rapidly and easily while still involving users by combining the storytelling aspects of scenarios, but leaving aspects of the scenario to be filled in by the user. We developed and evaluated three different formats for DesignLibs. This work was published at CHI 2013.

Examples of DesignLibs scenario prompts and generated scenario below

People

Jared Bauer
Julie Kientz

Publication

• Bauer, J. S., & Kientz, J. A. (2013, April). DesignLibs: a scenario-based design method for ideation. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1955-1958). ACM.