Bringing stimulated ideation in a web environment: students’ evaluations of a basic software release

Previous studies have demonstrated that creative design activities benefit from stimuli and that textual prompts might extend the exploration of the design space. However, the number of stimuli to conduct a wide exploration is large and the support of an ICT platform results necessary to manage a creative task effectively because of the presumably large number of generated ideas. Within a project named Startled, a very simple first release of a web application has been developed that supports ideation activities by means of stimuli. Dozens of students enrolled in different courses and Universities have tested the platform and answered a questionnaire, which aimed to elucidate their self-efficacy, perceived workload, ease of use and utility of the present version of the web application. The outcomes show, beyond few differences between students with diverse backgrounds, a majority of neutral and slightly positive answers. The results are not fully satisfying and the authors intend to make the ICT-supported creative tool more guided, user-friendly and intuitive.