Summary
Collaborative-creative online communities where users propose ideas and solutions to existing problems have shown that the suggestions can be simple, repetitive, and mundane. Thus, organizations view these platforms as marketing venues instead of innovation resources. Small groups and individual targeted creativity interventions demonstrated that they can improve the creativity outcomes. The authors propose a system that improves the quality of ideas proposed in large scale collaborative platforms. IdeaHound is an ideation system that integrates the task of defining semantic relationships among ideas into the primary task of idea generation. The proposed system creates a semantic model of the solution space by combining implicit human actions with machine learning. The system uses the semantic model to enable three main idea-enhancing interventions: sampling diverse examples, exploring similar ideas, and providing a visual overview of the emerging solution space. Users could use the system features to produce higher quality ideas. The authors conducted studies and experiments to show the effectiveness of the system and the need that this system fills.
Reflection
This was an interesting paper to read. I have never used an ideation platform and have no background in this area but I learned a lot from this reading. To my understanding, the proposed system would be helpful in crowd lead communities that propose ideas for an issue or a problem. This system seems to be useful in keeping track of similar ideas semantically and grouping them for users when they type their own. This solution would drastically reduce repetitiveness and help users to build on top of others ideas. Also, allowing users to have a visual overview of the solution space is another tool that would help in brainstorming. I think that the visualization is helpful to identify different topics, least explored ideas, and most focused on ideas. Which could help redirect users in different directions based on the cluster visualization.
I think that the interface when looking at the big picture is reasonable and very helpful. Yet when looking at the whiteboard and clusters of ideas up close, I feel like this could have been done better. Even though it is simple, using sticky notes as a resemblance of scrap notes, the page looks crowded and can be overwhelming for some users (at least me). I believe that there should be best practices for organizing ideas and maybe having a different interface would help making that process less messy and easier to understand.
I am conflicted about the paper. I like the idea behind the system but the user interface is just too overwhelming for me. I do not know what would be the best visual item to replace the sticky notes or how that section of the system would be altered but maybe in a future version they would offer choices for different users (sticky notes and maybe a menu with toggle/sorting ability items?).
Discussion
- Do you agree with the user interface design for the user workspace?
- How would you design this system’s user interface?
- Have you ever been part of a crowd based ideation process? What were your thoughts about that experience? Would you use a system similar to the proposed system for your task?
- What would be a better way to deal with a massive amount of ideas than sticky notes?
I totally agree with your point that the user interface is too crowded, especially when there is a huge amount of ideas. I think the system should hide irrelevant ideas automatically when there are too many ideas on the whiteboard and show them again when the users typed some ideas related to those hidden ideas. Also, the generated map of ideas is also too complicated. I think it would be better if the map can only show the headline of clusters and show the ideas in one cluster when the user clicks one of the clusters.