Ask a UXpert: How Do You Turn a Great Idea Into a Successful Reality?

We’ve all had those lightning bolt ideas – the ones that leap into your head in the middle of the night. You scribble them down feverishly on a piece of paper: you know this could be big. But, what next? When the sun rises, how do you take those great ideas and turn them into reality?

At Adobe MAX, experts from around the world joined together to share how they’ve turned their ideas into real life products and concepts that have shaped the world. We asked some of those experts to give us some advice on turning ideas into realities:

Sell that idea, to BOTH of your audiences

It goes without saying that passion is crucial, but you don’t just have to love your idea – you have to sell it. That’s the part that requires all the crazy, hard work.

Most importantly, you should work to understand your audience, and you should know that you have two: your target user isn’t typically the one listening to the sales pitch, but in both the corporate and client scenarios, you need to convince the person in front of you why they not only want, but need this magical idea of yours.

~Caroline Williams, Senior Digital Design Manager, Wyndham Hotel Group

Focus on the EXECUTION of your idea

You must understand the tools necessary to formulate, express, and act on the vision of reality. Ideas become reality when the tool becomes an extension of the creator. In many cases, to properly nurture your idea into reality, you’ll need to involve and trust other people while working within a team. You’ll have to use many different dimensions of tools, and persevere the course of conception. Now, go make it happen.

~Aaron Lawrence, Design Manager, Pivotal Labs

Get personal with your idea, then JUST START

• It scratches a personal itch – When I’m building something that is solving a problem I have, then I have an added investment in the project. It’s going to help me in the long run, so I know all the use cases and I’m not trying to find ways to make it amazing; it just needs to do one job really well. Once that idea becomes a reality and you release it to the public you’ll be amazed just how many people are facing that same problem and, in a short time, your simple solution is being used by tens/hundreds/thousands of people.
• Just start – For ideas that have turned into a reality I never spent too much time thinking and planning, I just kicked it off and started building. The biggest hurdle to getting something finished is actually starting it in the first place. Before I start the work, the idea seems like more effort than it actually is in practice. I often put it off until I have more time, or I wait until I’m inspired enough to take it on. These ideas are still just that, ideas.

~Justin Avery, CEO, Simple Things

Blend art, science, precision, and PERSEVERANCE

• There’s the art aspect of it: distilling a concept or idea down to its component parts, perhaps remixing or brainstorming ideas until it sits just right. You have to be detached from the idea enough to ditch it if it doesn’t work, but attached enough to bring the passion that will sell the excitement to both the team that funds it and the engineering team that makes it happen.
• It’s also a science: the best ideas are refined and vetted through a rigorous process of research, iteration, and more research.
• It’s precision: being able to identify the fundamental piece and carve away everything else until it’s elegant. There’s wisdom in knowing where the limits are – both your own and your team’s – because there are only 24 hours in a day and bringing ideas to fruition is a long term endeavor. And, of course, there’s perseverance, because nothing great is built in a day.

As an author and as a musician as well, the same fundamental truth holds true: crafting anything extraordinary takes an incredible amount of work.__ My last novel took months to write and clocked in at over 125,000 words. A three-minute short film I won two awards for took over 200 hours to create. I have to apply the same process to my creative work that I do to my professional work: shaping, evaluating, and iterating, often times until I’m sick of the project, and then celebrating the glorious result.

~Elaine Chao, Product Manager, Adobe XD

How do you transform your ideas into reality? Let us know in the comments below.