Have you ever heard about Starbursting? What a cool name for a design tool, but what does it really entail and how does it work? We prepared the most important facts for you in this article, also featuring a free template you can use.
What Is Starbursting?
No, we are not talking about the fruity candies with the same name. Starbursting is a tool for brainstorming and it focuses on understanding new ideas by asking questions about it and writing down the answers. A completed starbursting template will provide an overview of all the key elements of a new product or service idea. Starbursting is not necessarily a tool for Design Thinking, but is a popular choice for understanding and evaluating new ideas.
The Benefits of Brainstorming
Why would you even bother with brainstorming? Well, it is difficult to explain the flow and motion of ideas, if you never participated in a brainstorming session yourself. Basically several people meet up in person or maybe even virtually, to go crazy and drop wild ideas to analyze a problem and try to get closer to a possible solution. In order to capture your collective or individual results you can leverage the Starbursting tool.
Elements of the Starbursting Tool
Why is Starbursting called like that? Because the idea visualization uses a six-point-star and the information bursts out of its points. Each of the six points of the star has its own focus:
- Who
- What
- Why
- Where
- When
- How
Let me try to give you an example how these could be filled out when I want to visualize the idea of a new software solution that could solve problem x in a random enterprise.
- Who: Software will be used by service desk agents
- What: Software provides functions for knowledge management
- Why: Software can aid incident management and general FAQ processing
- Where: Software is hosted on-premise and available only on the intranet
- When: Development start is in April and go-live is planned for December
- How: Users record their resolution steps, and other information, which becomes available for both team-users and end-users
Starbursting Template
I’m a fan of one-pager tools, which consolidate a lot of information into a simple visualization. So the Starbursting tool was a really nice addition to our growing collection of free templates for you to use. We prepared you a version, that is in Microsoft PowerPoint format for you to leverage digitally, and we prepared you a PDF version that you can just print out and take to meetings and brainstorming workshops with you to write on.
Other Templates
If you are a fan of using templates you should also check out our other free templates below:
- How to Format a Word Document [Template] (Enterprise Content Management / Technical Writing)
- TurnAround PM: Project Square in English (Project Management)
Photo credit: Skeeze / Grutka / Gerd Altmann
