Braindumping is the process of unloading a cascade of thoughts, ideas, assumptions, questions, or impressions onto paper or sticky notes, so you free mental space and create raw material you can refine later. Use it to capture what’s floating around in your mind, including research notes, early ideas, pain-points, and messy sketches. Braindumps help you pause the noise, sift through what matters, and more clearly define the problems and opportunities you want to focus on.
In this video, William Hudson: User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd., explains how judgment-free brainstorming sessions spark bold ideas.
At first glance, the term “braindump” might seem random or even crude. However, this masks the immense value it can bring to ideation sessions and beyond. Braindumping is an ideation technique that comes from the broader family of methods which design teams use when ideating, or in the ideation phase of design thinking. It’s closely related to, but distinct from, classic brainstorming (a group-based idea generation approach) and other sibling methods such as brainwriting and brainwalking.
In this video, William Hudson shows you how the design thinking process helps you and your team understand users, redefine problems, and generate creative solutions that balance desirability, feasibility, and viability.
Braindumping improves outcomes because it aligns several factors: it taps into individual creativity and lays the groundwork for group ideation. That makes it one side of a potentially valuable “coin,” since individual ideation sessions (like braindumping) combined with group sessions produce more diverse and original ideas than group ideating alone. More specifically, the benefits of braindumping include how it:
Holding many thoughts, observations, assumptions, and partial ideas in your mind consumes mental energy. With all that mental bandwidth taken up, it limits creativity, and what can make that worse is that you might not even realize how much is clogging up your mind. One of the best ways to reach more advanced thinking is to remove internal clutter first. It’s a little like drain cleaner, but instead of dissolving the material, it prompts it to come out. And with cognitive unloading, you’ll stop trying to hold thoughts in your head and start working with them externally.
A significant risk in any group ideation exercise lies in the nature of the group itself. Sometimes, the fruitfulness of a session is only as good as the moderating skills of the facilitator. Louder voices and larger personalities can dominate the proceedings, or senior team members might “pull rank” by making statements which other team members might not want to debate (for fear of reprisal later). The result? Introverts and quieter participants can feel silenced. Happily, braindumping offers an “antidote” to such a potentially toxic environment in how it encourages everyone to externalize ideas individually before group dynamics take over.
Because your team postpones evaluation and the focus is on capture, you’ll harvest a broad set of raw ideas. User-centered work often involves messy inputs like research findings, competitor scans, stakeholder assumptions, user quotes, and more. Without capturing them properly, you and your design team may overlook or misremember important insights. Braindumping helps ensure nothing falls off the radar and, instead, ideas form a richer foundation for further ideation.
The output becomes raw, tangible artifacts that feed brainstorming, clustering, concept-generation, and prototyping. That’s why it’s wise to do braindumping before more structured sessions, as the team can go on to organize, combine, challenge, and refine individual members’ thoughts to great effect. And that can lead to more grounded, user-relevant, and innovative solutions.
Braindumping can act as a bridge between early-phase research or problem definition and the generation of truly innovative ideas. It helps designers move from a state of fuzzy thinking to a clearer set of possibilities, and it proves that teamwork can be so much more than the sum of its parts.
Braindumping works best at certain moments in the UX workflow, most notably:
After research but before ideation: Once you’ve completed user interviews, competitive audits, or an analytics review, run a braindump to surface lingering observations, assumptions, and curiosities before you and your team narrow things down into concepts.
At the start of a new phase: When you switch from one major stage to another, such as going from discovery to ideation, braindumping helps clear the mind of leftover issues and opens creative space.
When the team feels stuck: If you’re finding your idea generation is slow, or parts of the design feel blocked, do a quick braindump as it can unlock hidden thoughts and refresh momentum.
Before documentation or handoff: When you’re preparing project artifacts, such as case studies, handoffs, or retrospectives, braindumping lets you surface everything you learned. That includes even the less-polished bits, so you don’t leave anything on the table.
Here’s a step-by-step flow for how UX designers commonly adopt a braindumping session:
Begin by reaffirming the design problem or opportunity. Frame a “How Might We” question, or similar point-of-view statement, so that participants know what domain to focus on. While braindumping is freer than structured ideation, you’ll still benefit from a clear prompt.
In this video, William Hudson tells you how to turn design problems into actionable “How might we” questions that inspire creative solutions.
Allocate a short, fixed time, typically 3 to 10 minutes for individuals or 5 to 15 minutes for teams; in that time, participants write down everything that comes to mind (from the prompt). This timebox preserves energy and prevents overthinking or premature refinement of ideas (which might wreck an otherwise-superb thought or kernel of a potentially great idea).
Everybody participating works alone and writes or sketches as many thoughts as they have, be it on sticky notes, paper, or digital boards. Ideas may include research insights, user quotes, interface frustrations, wild concepts, and even contradictions or unknowns. The key is quantity and unfiltered capture, hence the “dump,” with the limit being only that the prompt triggers them (and that people don’t come out with “I need to collect the kids from school this afternoon.” or the like.)
Once the time is up, participants place their notes on a wall or board and briefly present or read out their ideas; critically, here, there’s to be no debate or judgment. Then, the team groups similar ideas, discards duplicates, and highlights themes for further exploration.
From the clustered ideas, the team selects promising threads to explore more deeply, and will do this via brainstorming, sketching, mind-mapping, prototyping, or user-testing. The braindump output becomes the input for more structured processes.
In this video, Alan Dix: Author of the bestselling book “Human-Computer Interaction” and Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University, explains how starting from well-informed design ideas, and then iteratively prototyping and testing with users, helps you refine solutions intelligently.
Try these practical tips to apply braindumping effectively in UX design:
Use one idea per note: Whether they’re sticky notes or digital cards, keep one thought per unit, as it helps with grouping and combination later.
Set the timer and enforce it: Keeping it short ensures focus and avoids overthinking, and that’s where good facilitation comes in handy.
Encourage freewriting and wild ideas: Remind participants that even exotic, “odd,” and “out there” concepts might trigger richer thinking later. Indeed, braindumping may generate many low-quality ideas because of unfiltered capture, and, sure, some ideas will be irrelevant or unfeasible. Still, that’s no reason to hold back from just “going for it,” hence why you’ll allocate time later to refine.
Avoid discussion during generation: Reserve critique and discussion for after the sharing phase; again, effective facilitation will help here.
Cluster quickly: As soon as the dump is done, group notes into themes. This helps transition into design activity.
Document the output: Photograph or digitize the grouped results so the team can revisit and link into the design record.
Follow through with an ideation technique: Use brainstorming, brainwriting, mind-mapping, or other techniques to refine and evolve the braindump results. Don’t let the latter languish as a pile of sticky notes that don’t lead to action; it would become a dump of wasted effort, moldering away while maybe harboring some gems of design ideas.
Use braindumping as a recurring tool: Don’t treat it as a one-time only activity. Designers often use it multiple times during a project when new information surfaces or momentum stalls.
Imagine a UX team who are working on improving a food-delivery app. They conduct user interviews and an analytics review, and then they gather for a braindumping session. The facilitator sets a prompt of: “How might we improve the experience of ordering a special-diet meal under time constraints?”
Each designer silently writes everything they recall, with researched observations such as “users avoid the filters because they’re buried,” frustrations like “I forgot which meal I chose,” ideas like “pre-select favorites for repeat users,” and questions like “what if meals expired early?”
After five minutes, everyone places their notes on the wall. The team then clusters into themes: filter usability, repeat-user shortcuts, meal-visibility, and time-pressure flows. From there, they move into a 20-minute brainstorming session using the clusters to spark creative concepts. Because they did the braindump first, their brainstorming is rich and grounded in real user insight rather than starting from a blank page.
Overall, braindumping in UX design is a powerful, low-cost method for tapping into individual ideas, clearing mental noise, and generating a rich set of inputs that fuel stronger ideation and design work. It’s like an extra cylinder in your design team’s “ideation engine,” and it can boost your group brainstorming while it helps your team work more effectively by starting from a broader and better-surfaced foundation.
The trick is to use it deliberately, setting clear prompts, timeboxing the exercise, capturing ideas individually, and then clustering them. Catch a team at the right time with this technique and you’ll find it can unlock hidden passageways to more creative, more inclusive, and more user-centered digital products and other design solutions.
For essential insights into techniques that promote effective design solutions, take our Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide course.
Enjoy our Master Class Innovate with Design Thinking: Your Shortcut to Results with Amr Khalifeh, Senior Consultant at AJ&Smart.
Discover helpful insights in our article Learn How to Use The Best Ideation Methods: Brainstorming, Braindumping, Brainwriting, and Brainwalking, which includes free templates for Braindumping and other ideation methods.
Explore further points and ideation techniques for better designs in our article Introduction to the Essential Ideation Techniques which are the Heart of Design Thinking.
Braindumping focuses on capturing every idea in your head without judgment or structure, while brainstorming involves group collaboration and idea generation around a specific topic. In a braindump, you empty your thoughts to clear mental clutter and uncover raw insights around a prompt. Brainstorming, meanwhile, typically follows a more interactive and goal-oriented path for a group.
Braindumps work best as a solo activity to explore thoughts, especially at the start of a UX project, before moving into a “group zone.” Brainstorming shines when teams build on each other’s ideas. You might use braindumping to discover what you already know deep down and then switch to brainstorming to explore new angles with others. Both methods serve creativity but in different ways.
Get more from your creative design sessions with our article What is Ideation – and How to Prepare for Ideation Sessions.
To start a braindump session for UX design work, set a timer for 10–15 minutes and focus on a specific area, which could be user needs, interface challenges, or design goals, for example. Write everything that comes to mind without stopping to edit or organize any of it. Use pen and paper, a digital note app, or voice-to-text if you prefer speaking.
The key is speed and volume; get your ideas out before self-censorship kicks in. This will help surface unconscious knowledge, early assumptions, and hidden insights. Many UX designers find value in starting sessions right after user interviews, as this captures raw impressions before memory fades. Create a distraction-free environment and let your thoughts flow freely; they may lead to exciting and effective solutions.
Speaking of assumptions, discover a treasure trove of insights into another effective approach in our article Learn How to Use the Challenge Assumptions Method.
After a braindump, review your notes and group related ideas into themes or categories. Use color-coding, bullet points, or digital tools to create visual clusters. Prioritize by relevance to your UX goals, such as user pain points, design ideas, or research questions. Label each group clearly to keep the insights actionable and effective.
Highlight duplicated or overlapping thoughts, as these often signal patterns worth exploring. Discard anything that feels off-topic or irrelevant. The important thing is to get everything out first and then continue with your braindump this way. That’s how you can transform raw, messy input into a structured foundation for ideation, research planning, or design sprints. You want to turn mental clutter into clarity and direction.
Explore further avenues and techniques in creativity for additional insights and ways to give you and your UX design team an extra edge in ideation sessions.
Effective braindump prompts should target your design goals or user problems, so try prompts like these ones: “What do I already know about this user?” or “What could frustrate someone using this app?” or “What questions remain unanswered after research?”
Use open-ended questions to unlock deeper thinking, such as “What if the user had no technical skills?” or “What would a radically simple version of this feature look like?” Good prompts help steer your mind without limiting creativity or locking you into too narrow an area to explore meaningfully. Tailor them to your project’s stage: early prompts should explore unknowns; later ones can refine ideas. Strong prompts turn vague thoughts into sharp insights, and so they can guide UX decisions with purpose.
Discover more avenues of productive design creativity, with our article Introduction to the Essential Ideation Techniques which are the Heart of Design Thinking.
No, don’t filter or edit during a braindump, as the point is to capture raw, unfiltered thoughts before your inner critic steps in. Editing interrupts flow and can stifle original ideas. Even ideas that seem irrelevant or silly might lead to breakthroughs later. Keep the momentum going by writing continuously and avoiding judgment. Filtering comes afterwards, during the review and organization parts.
This process preserves spontaneity, surfaces subconscious insights, and reduces cognitive load. Designers often miss great ideas by self-censoring too early, and it can happen without your even realizing it. So, let everything out first, and then refine. The messiness of a braindump is its strength; it mirrors how the brain naturally connects ideas, so go with it.
Explore other potential “hazards” to creativity in our article 14 Barriers to Ideation and How to Overcome Them for important insights and tips.
Capture all ideas, including the “bad” or off-topic ones; you’ll evaluate them later. Label questionable thoughts as “wild,” “unsure,” or “off-road” instead of deleting them. These ideas may trigger better ones or highlight assumptions worth testing, or they might well contain hidden gems or germs of ideas.
During the braindump, avoid judging ideas altogether. It’s afterwards where categorization and trimming irrelevant items happens. If an idea consistently feels out of place, archive it instead of discarding it; it might fit another project, and so save you valuable time too.
Off-topic ideas often reveal new perspectives or forgotten user needs, and unexpected ideas sometimes spark innovation in UX design. So, keep the door open for serendipity during the dump, and then guide your insights with clarity during analysis.
Gain some inspiration from the bad ideas approach to ideation (feel better, too, from how “good” something “bad” can be).
Braindumping can help you form user personas (research-based, synthetic representations of real users) by pulling together what you already know (consciously and unconsciously) about your users. Before you create personas, braindump everything you remember from user research, interviews, and observations.
Include pain points, goals, behaviors, and emotional triggers. This unstructured approach can uncover overlooked details and biases you need to check. Once the ideas are out in the open, sort them into patterns that represent distinct user types. Then, build personas around those clusters. You may find richer, more empathetic personas grounded in your raw impressions. What’s more, braindumping helps ensure your personas don’t just reflect surface-level data but capture deeper user realities too.
Discover more about personas to appreciate why you’ll want to design with them.
Right after finishing user research, set aside time for a solo braindump session. Write down everything you can recall, which could include user quotes, surprising reactions, repeated complaints, or emotional moments. Include both facts and feelings.
Don’t worry about structure; just capture impressions quickly before they fade. Use sticky notes, a whiteboard, or voice memos: whatever helps. Doing this can surface insights that structured analysis might miss. After the dump, review your notes to spot patterns and themes, and then validate those with your actual research data. Braindumping serves as a neat bridge to span the gap between raw data and design direction, and it helps you capture the emotional nuance and context behind the numbers.
Firm up a stronger grasp of user research and start building a solid foundation on which to help move forwards with effective ideation.
To prioritize ideas after a braindump, first sort them into themes: like user needs, technical constraints, or design opportunities. Then, apply frameworks like the MoSCoW method (Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, Won’t-have) or an impact-effort matrix.
Ask questions like these: “Which idea solves a core user pain point?” or “Which idea can we implement quickly with high impact?” Get rid of duplicates and defer low-value items. Some digital tools can help you visualize priorities clearly. Above all, turn top ideas into action steps for your design process. Prioritization transforms your UX design braindump from a chaotic list into a focused, strategic roadmap.
Discover how to make the most of a helpful prioritization tool, with our article Making Your UX Life Easier with the MoSCoW.
To guide a team braindump, set a clear topic and time limit: usually 10–15 minutes. Ask everyone to write ideas silently at first to prevent groupthink. Be sure to encourage quantity over quality. Ask everyone to use sticky notes, shared documents, or digital whiteboards: whatever works to gather input. Remind participants not to judge ideas yet.
After the dump, group similar items and discuss patterns together. Vitally, create an inclusive space where all voices are heard and none drown out others. Capture wild ideas; “outrageous” as they might seem, they often lead to innovation in some way. Use a facilitator to keep focus and momentum, or be the one to do it. Effective team braindumps foster psychological safety and creative confidence, and they can produce a goldmine of insights for your UX process, team, brand, and (ultimately) your product’s users.
Get a better idea of where to take the fruit of your team’s creative efforts in our article How to Select the Best Idea by the End of an Ideation Session.
Ryder, C. (2022). Ideation methods – Brain dumping [Class assignment]. Principles of User Experience, Spring 2022.
This class assignment by Cheyanne Ryder, completed for a UX design course in Spring 2022, documents personal experimentation with ideation methods including brain dumping, analogies, and SCAMPER. “Brain dumping” is described as getting all mental ideas onto paper to clear cognitive space for further ideation. Ryder applied the method across multiple UX case studies (apps like Headspace, Finch, and Dailyio), showing how brain dumping aided problem framing and idea development. Although not peer-reviewed, it directly uses and defines the term brain dumping in a design ideation context, offering real-use examples of its application in UX problem-solving.
Steckler, S. (n.d.). The Daily Productivity & Brain Dump Book. Sarah Steckler.
Sarah Steckler’s Daily Productivity & Brain Dump Book is a 205-page softcover planner designed to help users declutter their minds, reduce decision fatigue, and enhance focus through structured brain dumps. It includes 90 daily brain dump pages, 90 productivity planning pages, an index, and extra list pages for task organization. Steckler, a certified wellness coach and mindfulness practitioner, developed this tool to promote clarity and emotional well-being by helping individuals externalize mental clutter. The planner is printed in the U.S. and sized at 8x10 inches, providing a practical, psychology-informed approach to everyday productivity enhancement.
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