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Four Categories Method

This document discusses the Four Categories method for evaluating and ranking ideas during the convergent stage of an ideation session. The method involves dividing ideas into four categories: the rational choice, the most likely to delight, the darling, and the long shot. It provides instructions for using post-it voting to help groups select the best ideas from each category.

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Minh Quân Đặng Lê
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28 views4 pages

Four Categories Method

This document discusses the Four Categories method for evaluating and ranking ideas during the convergent stage of an ideation session. The method involves dividing ideas into four categories: the rational choice, the most likely to delight, the darling, and the long shot. It provides instructions for using post-it voting to help groups select the best ideas from each category.

Uploaded by

Minh Quân Đặng Lê
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Most rational Most delightful Darling Long shot

Four Categories Method


Why
At some point in your ideation sessions, you’ll have reached a critical mass of ideas, and it will
become unproductive to attempt to keep pushing for more. This is referred to as the ‘convergent
stage’ where ideas are evaluated, compared, ranked, clustered and even ditched in an attempt to
pull together a few great ideas to act on. Right now, the aim is spotting potential winners, or
combinations of winning attributes, from a number of ideas.

What
The Four Categories method entails dividing ideas according to their relative abstractness, ranging
from the most rational choice to the 'long shot'. The four categories are: the rational choice, the
most likely to delight, the darling, and the long shot. This method ensures that the team covers all
grounds, from the most practical to the ideas with the most potential to deliver innovative
solutions.

Best practice: How


• Ideation participants decide upon one or two ideas for each of these categories: the rational
choice, the most likely to delight, the darling, and the long shot.

• If you’re a relatively small team you simply discuss the pros and cons of the chosen ideas.

[Continued on next page]

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Creative Commons BY-SA license: You are free to edit and redistribute this template, even for commercial use, as long as you give credit to the Interaction Design Foundation. Also, if you remix,
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[Continued from previous page]

• If you’re a large team you can mix this method with Post-it Voting (also known as Dot Voting):

A B C D E

Post-it Voting
• Write all of the ideas which the participants have chosen on individual Post-its.

• Then you give all participants a number of votes (around three to four should do) to choose and
write down their personal favourite ideas.

• Participants vote by using stickers or simply using a marker to make a dot on the ideas they like.
This process allows every member to have an equal say in the shortlisted ideas.

• You can also use variations in colour in order to let participants vote on which ideas they like the
most or which they dislike the most.

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Creative Commons BY-SA license: You are free to edit and redistribute this template, even for commercial use, as long as you give credit to the Interaction Design Foundation. Also, if you remix,
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transform, or build upon this template, you must distribute it under the same CC BY-SA license.
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