Heads up: Our Ideas Factory has been refreshed, levelled up, and grown-up into Alphero Intelligence. Some of our old posts are pretty cool tho'. Check this one out.
- Our team engaged in an ideation process about contextual help in the browser.
- One of the ideas was providing financial insights as you are about to make a purchase.
- We prototyped how a Chrome Extension could integrate with a bank to provide the users with insights on how a purchase would affect them.
A big part of the Ideas Factory work is coming up with ideas by using techniques and processes to tackle new and old problems. These techniques allow us to mash seemingly unrelated concepts and ideas to come up with new takes on things that were obvious-but-not-that-obvious, and help us keep innovation at the forefront of what we do.
Early in 2019, we came up with a challenge about contextual help. How could we give users contextual information when they need it, and make things easier and better for them?
One of the ideas our team came up with was an app that would give you financial insights on the spot. Just as you are about to buy those cool new shoes or spend some money on those gadgets, the information would be brought back from your bank account to show you how that would affect your finances.
After some discussion, we realised we didn’t need a full-fleshed app for that - we could have a Chrome Extension that would detect that you are on an e-commerce site and show you a pop-up with information about your current bank information, show you the impact of that purchase and help you save for it.
This idea helped our team understand the workflow and capabilities of developing browser extensions and how to design for them. Most of all, it highlighted how a seed of an idea can grow into something simple and useful!
Since then we have expanded this idea on an innovation project with a government department. They have a web system that can’t be changed much under the hood, and we used a Chrome Extension to inject tooltips and facilitate workflow where users need more information about a step in the process.