The Creative Sessions are meant to dig deep into your business idea and really try to understand the target audience. What do you need to be successful, what does your target audience get from you, and why is your idea relevant? We ask critical questions, assess what your new business needs, and brainstorm about the website or platform you need to succeed. Together we do research into whatever your questions, challenges, or wishes are. For example, what brand archetype fits your organization, which colors would match, or how does a user navigate your website?

The Creative Sessions are really about understanding your target audience and their problems. The goal is to come up with solutions that will really help the people your service, product, or organization is meant for. That’s why it’s vital to bring more experts to the table. When you have different perspectives, backgrounds, and expertise on board, you can really prevent assumptions about your product, service or company. But more importantly; about your target users. The result? A well-researched working prototype, which you can really test with users. That way, you can keep learning, inventing, and improving.

We use the Design Sprint as a backbone for the Creative Session. Depending on the challenges of our client, we decide which parts fit the session best. Using principles from Design Thinking, Design Sprinting, and many more methods, we actively research the problem and decide where to go from there. Finding out the right problem is key.

The principles of the Design Sprint that we use, originate from design thinking. The Design Sprint can be seen as a pressure cooker for fast results. Think of it as an efficient, effective, and fun workshop. The Design Sprint was designed to quickly come up with innovative concepts or develop an existing product, service, or idea into an inexpensive working prototype.

In Design Thinking, the problems are solved differently, always with the user in mind. The major focus in design thinking is about making things that are appropriate for people. With this kind of thinking, the problem isn’t always clear-cut. Therefore, design thinking is about discovering if you challenge the right problem. When trying to solve an issue, you have to find the core, finding the fundamental issues, instead of trying to find a solution to a [perhaps] wrong problem.

When those core issues have been found, it’s not just a matter of coming up with solutions – it’s about testing, learning, and adjusting. It’s a continuous process, learning, and changing. 

Working in a design sprint will boost creativity, thinking out of the box, and make you get out of your comfort zone. This makes the Design Sprint method very effective and productive. And thus very useful to use in the Creative Sessions.

Would like like to know the difference between Design Thinking and the Design Sprint? Read our previous Insight!

The Creative Sessions consists of a couple of key ingredients. It’s important to avoid assumptions, come up with the most creative solutions and visualize them in a sustainable way. And to always have the user in mind.

Our Creative Sessions are always tailored to your question, situation or needs. We can focus on Business Modeling, Targetgroup analysis, Branding, functionalities, and much more. 

The length of the Session depends on the problem. We might advise two days, three, or more than five. However, a typical Creative Session usually takes around 5 days.

The first day of the session is about gathering information, insights, and useful knowledge about the idea, business, service. And about its prospective users. Your plan will never work if no-one is interested. Dive deep into what they would like to see, what their true pain points, problems or challenges are that you could possibly solve. 

When you’ve come up with your target group, step two is to ideate solutions. We’ll get creative at this point in the session, to come up with as many solutions as possible. When all the brains are drained, pick a solution that seems most viable to start visualizing the solution at day three. How can you make it work, what would you need, what would you need to do, and how could you accomplish all that? 

After thinking your solution through thoroughly, everyone is loving it and believes in whatever you’ve co-created – prototype it. Try to prototype in a sustainable, inexpensive way – because this is the time to test with real possible users. Share your ideas, let them use your prototype and gather feedback. This is the power of prototyping. If the users love it, wonderful. If they’ve got some feedback – it’s easy to start this process again and again and again until the best possible prototype is found. With that well-researched prototype, building your product, service, or business will be much easier than starting from scratch.

The good thing about our Creative Session is that we are flexible from the moment we get to know you. Because we realize that your question or challenge requires customisation. That is exactly what we offer in the Creative Session, we tune in to your needs. Plan a discovery call to see what a Creative Session with Ngrane could mean for you. 👩‍💻