Uncovering Hidden Preferences with Heat Map Technique
Where's the Heat? Whare is the group preference?
Situation:
When you have collected a lot of ideas, concepts, and information on a (virtual) whiteboard and you want to visualize the group preferences, where is the interest, where is the heat?
This is why it is also called Heat Map.
It is also beneficial when you just want everybody to read all the collected information and they can do this in silence and then place their points of interest using dots.
You can use this before actual voting of the top 3 ideas, concepts, and information as well. It makes sense if the time allows placing as well sticky notes with questions as and after the heat map exercise the questions are asked and someone will answer (not necessarily the owner of the sticky note).
Which are the steps to follow?
🎲 Everyone gets a large sheet of dots. Tell everyone this is a non-binding voting exercise used to check out the group preferences.
🎲 Everyone has 5 minutes to look at all the ideas/concepts/information on the (virtual) whiteboard / in the room and read them through.
🎲 Everyone puts dots next to things they think are interesting, it can be words, a feature, or a whole concept. The dots are unlimited, everyone can put as many dots as they want.
🎲 You ask them to use all their dots.
🎲 You see then immediately where the focus of the group is by looking at where the most dots are. It is visible immediately where most of the dots are concentrated.
One-phrase summary:
The Heat Map exercise is best used when you need each participant to make one vote on a big idea among many, and each idea has a lot of details. So rather than asking participants to make a difficult decision and try to hold all the information in their heads while they evaluate the different options, a Heat Map will serve as a great visual summary of where the best parts of each big idea are.
It is super fast, right?
Resources:
Design Sprint Masterclass from AJ&Smart
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