Mark Geller

As I mentioned last week, I am slowly making my way through Jesse Schell’s excellent book, “The Art of Game Design, A Book of Lenses,” in which Dr. Schell presents a series of 100 “lenses,” or aspects to consider when designing a game that help maximize the playability, fun, and profitability of the finished product. I highly recommend this book, obviously for anyone who is interested in designing games, and also for anyone involved in creating new consumer products of any kind, from web sites to software to household items or baby blankets.

When I started this blog, one of the things I thought could be helpful to write about would be to compile some ideas about ways to be more creative, in particular for coming up with new products and also product names. Please note my goal is not to hold myself up as a paragon of creativity and idea generation. However, over the years I believe I have a established a fairly strong track record for coming up with interesting and useful product ideas and names, and I am often asked by colleagues and friends to assist in this process. Here are a few aspects of the process that have been useful for me, hopefully they may be useful to y’all as well.

The list below is not intended to be comprehensive or a “system” you can use from start to finish, however, with the inspiration of Dr. Schell’s book, here are a few lenses that may help to be more creative in generating ideas for products, names, and other stuff.

Lens #1: The Lens of Belief

To be creative, you must believe you can be creative.

You must not say or silently think things like, “Coming up with new ideas is great for other people, but I have never been the creative type, so it’s not for me.”

Generating new ideas is not rocket science, it is just a game you can play with a few raw materials and some joking around until you come up with something you like (that meets your business objectives, and preferably with a reasonably priced URL).

If you are willing–and interested–to come up with new ideas, you can and you will… only if you believe you can.

Lens #2:  The Lens of Observation

To come up with interesting ideas for new products, take some time to observe–yourself and others.

In particular, pay special attention to anything and everything you encounter in your daily life (or in your product, if you have one) that bothers you… even if it only bothers you a little bit. Also, notice anything that doesn’t exist that you wish did. For example, the idea for KlickFu came from watching my nephew as he sat next to me using his computer, noticing something interesting he was doing with his mouse and then asking some questions about what he was doing and what he was trying to accomplish.

Lens #3: The Lens of How Could This Be Better?

Once you observe something that bothers you or you wish were different, ask yourself, “How could this be modified so it would be better?”

Often, simply asking this question will lead to some initial solutions or product improvements… however, they are often even better when combined with the next lens.

Lens #4: The Lens of What If This Were Automagical?

As you are considering how something–a web site, software, hardware product, customer service process, etc.–could be better, take some time to suspend your idea of the limitations of how the thing currently works, or how it needs to work.

Ask yourself, if this thing were automagical and awesome and did exactly what I wanted in the way I wanted it to do it, how would this work? Once you have this vision in your mind, you can start to think of ways the thing could come closer to that.

For example, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, has said the perfect search engine would literally read your mind to know what you thought you were looking for, and would provide it to you before you asked. Google search does not perform at this level yet, however having this goal in mind provides product focus and a solid basis for new ideas. (You may have had a few ideas just reading his description!)

Lens #5: The Lens of Removing Steps (Preferably All Of Them)

Often in designing new products, and almost always in the case of web sites and software:

Faster is better. Much faster is much better–and removing an entire process completely is often the best.

For example, take the case of Quicken (from Intuit) and Mint.com for recording and categorizing expenses. The original process of balancing a checkbook by hand was tedious and time-consuming. Quicken improved the process by creating software with a handy auto-complete function for categorizing expenses. Mint.com has made the process even better by eliminating the categorization step entirely, by inspecting the payees on expenses and categorizing them automagically. (Mint.com was acquired by Intuit for $170 million yesterday, so that was obviously a useful innovation.)

Other prominent examples of breakthrough innovation by removing steps (or buttons) include:

• The Facebook News Feed, automatic activity reports that require zero work from the user.
• iPod – Zero buttons, one simple dial.
• iPhone – Remove the keyboard, get more screen real estate with a slim, light design.

For what it’s worth, the fundamental innovation of KlickFu is to remove steps in playing games on the computer to make the process more instant and fun.

Lens #6 – The Lens of Walking Around (& Watching TV)

This lens is more geared toward product names although it can work for products and features as well.

When coming up with a new name, every thing you see in the world can be the start of a free association that leads to a new set of name ideas–get up, go outside, walk around, travel to a new place and surround yourself with new leads for ideas.

Often when people need to come up with new names, especially in a work setting, they meet in a quiet, square room with whiteboards on the walls and window shades drawn and then stare at each other while they think of new ideas. (I am guilty myself, having done this numerous times.)  This makes the job so much tougher… and less fun!

The world is jam-packed with inspirations for new name concepts. If you want to come up with new names, rather than sit in a white-board lined isolation chamber, get out, walk around, seek out stimuli of total random kinds. (Also, surfing Google Images and watching random TV channels can be excellent for this as well.) Then, be insanely, ridiculously, detailed in your observations and obsessively brainstorm variations of these until you come up with something you like.

For example, say you are coming up with names for a new site that sells dog clothes (a truly random example). Turn on the TV (I just did), there is an ad for dog products at Walmart with a dog on the bed. How about footofthebed.com, bluecollar.com, redcollar.com. Do a Google Images search on “dog on the bed” and see phrases that lead to perfectdog.com, doggear.com, perfectpooch.com, fidonculous.com… maybe not the perfect names, although that took about one minute to generate that list.

Totally unassociated random references can be even better. Continuing the last example, go outside and see a car… dogs chase cars, how about caughtthecar.com (available!). Turn on QVC, with a hostess selling jewelry–maybe diamonddogs.com, sterlingdog.com, exclusivedog.com… etc.

Personally, what I find helpful is to do a bit of brainstorming at my computer (usually with a site handy to check the availability of domain names). Then I go out and carry on with my daily activities, constantly noticing random elements to generate new “mini-families” of names. If I come up with something I am excited about, I make a note to remember it when I get home. (I figure if I can’t remember it for a few hours, it’s probably not worth remembering.)

The point is there is a nearly infinite amount of stimuli for names in the world. To increase your flow of ideas, simply look for any and all random references and then brainstorm on them. With a little time and practice, you may start to come up with a few you like.

As I said, this list is not intended to be exhaustive. However, if you are looking to create new products and names, hopefully there is something here you will find useful.

If you are still totally stumped after reading this and trying some examples, contact me and maybe I can help.