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ioning team to no more than eight people—several teams can vision in parallel if you want
more people to be involved. A vision should take 20-40 minutes to create, depending on
the complexity of the practice being supported.
Whentheteamdecidesavisioniscompleteenough,theyputitaside,turntoanotherhot
idea, and do another vision. Because each vision is, by design, systemic and holistic, it is
quitelikelythatavisionincorporatesmorethanonehotidea.Soaftereachvision,theteam
re-evaluates which hot ideas have been covered and which will be most interesting to do
next. It is rarely necessary to do a separate vision for every hot idea. Similarly, because the
people in the vision session walked the wall, they already have their design ideas in their
heads—as the story of the user's new world emerges they naturally pull in their own ideas,
adjusting them to the story that's being told.
A team typically completes 4-6 visions to address a design problem. In some areas the
visions are likely to build on each other—“We'll just handle that the way we did in the last
vision,” the team might say. In other areas, the visions will be independent. In others, they
will be incompatible. This is expected.
Figure 4.15:
A vision created by a team—hand-drawn, on a flip chart. Ability to draw is not a necessary skill
for the pen.
Vision evaluation:
Once the team completes visioning they can bring their evaluative
thinking to bear on the emerging design ideas as a separate step. This is itself a design
step—identifying aspects of a vision that don't work prompts the team to generate new
design solutions that work better. On the flip side, identifying what is working makes good
ideas explicit, ensuring they are not lost and that everyone on the team understands why
they matter.
The critique in vision evaluation is tightly structured. There are only three valid issues
with a vision: lack of fit to user practice, technical difficulty, and incompatibility with the
business mission. In evaluation, the team first lists all the aspects of the vision that work
