Crowdstorming is the practice of tapping into a large, open group of people to brainstorm ideas, solutions, or features, usually through digital platforms, and then using that input to shape design work. In UX (user experience) design, crowdstorming helps you generate feature ideas, interaction concepts, or user experience improvements by inviting your user base, stakeholders, or even the public to contribute creatively.
In this video, William Hudson: User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd., explains how brainstorming sessions spark powerful and bold ideas.
Imagine you’re working on a mobile banking app and you’re not sure how to simplify the account setup process for new users. You’ve just tested a few flows, but the feedback comes in mixed; you’re unsure which way to go with it. So, instead of relying only on your team, you open the challenge up to the user community itself. You ask, “What’s one change that would make our sign-up feel easier and faster?” Within days, dozens of users submit suggestions, ranging from redesigning the form layout to skipping certain steps altogether. Others vote and comment, a great help for refining the top ideas. You take the best suggestions, prototype them, and test again: with clearer results.
This is crowdstorming in action; notice the convenience it offers? Unlike crowdsourcing, which often focuses on small tasks or basic feedback, crowdstorming emphasizes collaboration and creative input. It’s about taking matters “to the streets” to learn from the actual userbase you seek to serve. You use crowdstorming when you want fresh thinking, fast ideation, and community-driven insight that helps you design smarter and improve the chances your digital product or design solution will resonate with whom you intend it to.
As a way to ideate towards excellent design decisions, the chance to crowdstorm can be golden. You might run a design challenge, ask for feedback on interface concepts, or collect ideas for solving specific user pain points. More specifically, when you get “out there” with it, you can bring in powerful benefits of crowdstorming, such as to:
Crowdstorming generates more ideas than a typical design meeting can. It adds considerable “firepower” to your UX process as it expands your creative reach and helps you collect better ideas, faster and from wider. The large, open nature of the process means you receive input from many people, often in parallel, and this idea volume raises your odds of spotting that one innovative solution or outlier concept that sparks the next big feature. Unlike traditional brainstorming where a few voices can dominate, crowdstorming levels the playing field, out there where perfect strangers don’t worry about office politics and everyone’s got a chance to contribute.
A broader crowd naturally makes for more diversity in background, experience, and thinking styles. When you open up your design challenges to a broad group of contributors, you gain access to insights and possibilities that internal teams alone may never uncover. Crowdstorming participants might span different cultures, languages, technical skills, or usage contexts, which delivers diversity that helps you see the problem through fresh eyes. That’s often vital to uncover unmet needs or creative directions your internal team may overlook. It helps reduce bias in ideation, too, especially if your design team comes from a narrow demographic.
In this video, Alan Dix: Author of the bestselling book “Human-Computer Interaction” and Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University, shows how cultural differences shape interface design and why relying on diverse perspectives helps you avoid biased or narrow solutions.
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Crowdstorming scales; and, with the right platform, you can gather hundreds of ideas in days, not weeks. What’s more, because contributions happen online and asynchronously, people can submit ideas anytime, anywhere. That flexibility helps you get a wider range of input quickly, even while your team focuses on other tasks, and you don’t have to handle limitations from workshop schedules or in-person research logistics.
When you invite users to help solve problems, you make them co-creators. That kind of engagement builds loyalty and empathy. People generally love being asked for their opinions, especially when they see their ideas taken seriously. It gives your users a voice and turns them into active participants, not just passive testers and “thanks for your time.” Crowdstorming helps you build stronger relationships with your community while improving your product, which can become their product all the more when it’s ripe for release to the right target audience.
While crowdstorming does take some setup, facilitation, and moderation, the cost per idea or per participant is often lower than running focus groups or extensive interviews. You can tap into existing users, employees, or even the public without the logistical costs of in-person sessions. Some platforms even offer built-in tools for idea submission, voting, and analysis, and so further reduce your operational load.
When many people point in the same direction, you gain confidence. Crowdstorming often includes voting, ranking, or commenting features that help you find which ideas resonate most with your audience. This collective input can help you prioritize features, avoid costly missteps, and spot trends that might not surface in traditional research.
Crowdstorming isn’t just a one-time tactic; you can build it into your long-term UX process and keep reaping significant rewards. After launch, you can keep a feedback channel open for ideas, feature suggestions, or design improvements. That ongoing stream of input helps you maintain a steady pulse on user needs and adapt more quickly as expectations shift: a friendly “early-warning” system.
Working in small teams or tight deadlines often leads to narrow thinking and can even mean some disengagement from the real users. You can get locked into a few ideas and miss better ones. Crowdstorming broadens your perspective and reminds you that innovation often comes from unexpected places. By opening your process early to external voices, you reduce the risk of heading down the wrong path before investing too much in it. So, you’ll more likely prove great empathy with the users you know your product can serve well.
This video explains how designing with empathy uncovers real user needs, using airport examples to show how thoughtful information and environments help people stay calm and reach their goals.
Running a successful crowdstorming effort takes more than just asking for ideas, as you’ll need to set the stage, guide participants, and follow through with a clear plan. So, here’s how to do it step by step, with strategic decisions built into each part of the process:
To begin, identify a specific problem or opportunity in your UX workflow. Ask yourself: “What are we trying to solve?” Make it focused enough to encourage useful ideas, but open enough to invite creativity. And, as vague prompts like “How can we improve our app?” often lead to scattershot suggestions, a better challenge might be, “What would make our mobile checkout easier for first-time users?”
Next, decide who should contribute. Will you open the challenge to your user community, internal teams, the public, or a mix of them?
Use your existing users if you want ideas grounded in real usage experience.
Use employees or cross-functional teams whenever you need technical or business constraints to inform ideas.
Open it to the public or adjacent communities if you want fresh outsider perspectives.
The key is alignment; so, match the challenge to the people best equipped to solve it. Remember, don’t rely on crowdsourcing when you need deep contextual understanding, sensitive usability data, or nuanced behavior insights that only emerge in one-on-one sessions. In those cases, traditional user research methods work better.
Choose a platform that supports your crowdstorming structure, such as these:
Community forums
Crowdsourcing platforms
Internal portals or surveys
Custom web forms
Set participation rules clearly. Explain how to contribute, what kind of input you want, and how you’ll evaluate it. If you want collaborative refinement, enable commenting and idea building. You might structure participation in phases, such as submission, feedback, and voting, too.
Spread the word and actively manage the process. Promote the challenge across relevant channels and keep the crowd energized. Highlight standout ideas, send reminders, and publicly thank participants. Good moderation ensures focus and quality while keeping enthusiasm high; stay aware and don’t walk away from what you’ve started.
When the submission period ends, review the ideas using clear criteria:
User impact
Feasibility
Technical constraints
Alignment with your UX goals
You might combine expert review with community voting. Just remember, popularity doesn’t always mean the best fit; so, evaluate ideas through the lens of real user needs and practical implementation.
Shortlist the strongest contributions and move them into design; turn concepts into wireframes, prototypes, or mockups, and then iterate. You can run another round of voting or feedback to help narrow down options. This step is key as it bridges creative input and production design.
In this video, Alan Dix explains how beginning with well-informed design ideas and then iteratively prototyping and testing with users helps you refine solutions in a smart way.
Close the loop with your crowd. Share what ideas were selected, what you built, and what you learned. Recognize contributors with public shout-outs, small rewards, badges, or early access; these will go a long way in building trust and future participation.
After launch, track how well crowdstormed features perform. Did they solve the intended problem? Did they improve usability? Use those results to improve your next challenge and refine your overall UX approach accordingly.
To apply crowdstorming effectively, map it to the right stages of your design process. It fits especially well in early to mid-phase UX work, although it can add value throughout the product lifecycle, too:
Crowdstorming can help you define the right problems to solve. Instead of starting with assumptions, you might ask your user base: “What’s the most frustrating part of using our product?” or “What do you wish our tool could do for you?” You collect real-world pain points or feature suggestions, which can guide your research and roadmap safely away from your team’s or stakeholders’ assumptions.
Naturally, this is the sweet spot for crowdstorming, and Ideation forms the central part of the design thinking process. You run a structured challenge asking participants to submit interface concepts, feature ideas, or workflow improvements. You can encourage them to sketch ideas or vote on proposed solutions, too. It helps you generate a wide range of possibilities before narrowing down your focus.
In this video, William Hudson explains how design thinking guides you through generating and refining ideas so you can move from broad possibilities toward viable solutions.
Once you’ve built a few concepts, prototypes, or wireframes, you can ask your crowd to weigh in. Present multiple flows or UI (user interface) mockups and let people comment, suggest changes, or even remix designs. Their feedback can throw open the doors on potentially overlooked areas and help you refine prototypes and iterate more confidently.
Keep the momentum going after release; let users suggest improvements or new features based on real use. Consider running small, recurring crowdstorming sprints where the community helps evolve the product optimally. You might even use a public roadmap where users vote or submit feature requests.
Overall, because crowdstorming is about turning design into a collaborative, open process, it can be a great way to help you gather more ideas, reach more users, and uncover insights that internal brainstorming may never yield. Do it well and it will enhance creativity, increase engagement, and strengthen your connection with your users.
However, it’s not just about volume; structure, moderation, and follow-through make or break the effort. If you guide participants with clear prompts, evaluate ideas with care, and turn the best contributions into real design decisions, you can unlock real value.
Crowdstorming can come in handy in many scenarios, and it supports (not replaces) user research by adding energy, scale, and unexpected thinking to your UX toolkit. So, the next time you’re stuck on a feature, unsure about a design direction, or eager to build community around your product, consider throwing open the doors wide. You might well find that your best ideas are already out there, waiting in the crowd.
Discover essential insights into techniques that promote effective design solutions from our course Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide.
Enjoy our Master Class Innovate with Design Thinking: Your Shortcut to Results with Amr Khalifeh, Senior Consultant at AJ&Smart.
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.
Crowdstorming is a collaborative ideation method where a crowd, usually external users or customers, shares, discusses, and refines ideas to solve a defined challenge. It differs from crowdsourcing in that it emphasizes interaction and iteration. While crowdsourcing seeks completed outputs (like a logo or solution), crowdstorming seeks ideas and encourages the crowd to build on one another’s input.
Participants brainstorm openly, react to others’ suggestions, and help evolve early concepts into stronger ones. For example, platforms like LEGO Ideas allow users to propose product concepts, which the crowd then supports or critiques, driving co-creation. This method fosters creative diversity and deep engagement by treating users not just as contributors, but as co-innovators.
Gain helpful insights into another aspect of what crowds can do for your brand, in our article Making Use of the Crowd – Social Proof and the User Experience.
Crowdstorming works best for open-ended design problems that benefit from diverse user insights. It helps solve challenges like envisioning new product features, improving user experiences, or identifying unmet needs.
Since the crowd comes from outside the organization, they bring fresh perspectives; that’s useful when internal teams face creative fatigue or tunnel vision. For example, a fintech startup might use crowdstorming to explore how users want to manage subscriptions. This process surfaces real-world pain points and reveals novel solutions to meet and exceed user needs. Crowdstorming is ideal for early-stage ideation, especially when brands want to validate ideas directly with those who'll use the product.
Explore user needs and build a clearer picture of how these form the core of any design effort.
Start by publishing a clear, engaging design challenge on an open platform. Define what kind of ideas you’re looking for and who should participate. Use a platform that allows public discussion, commenting, and voting.
Promote your challenge through social media, newsletters, or user communities to attract diverse participants. Keep submission formats simple: short descriptions, sketches, or mockups. Encourage dialogue by asking participants to react to each other’s ideas. Set a clear timeline and provide regular feedback. Most importantly, close the loop: announce winners, show how ideas are used, and thank contributors. This builds trust and motivates future engagement.
Explore helpful points from how creative design sessions work to see how they might fit alongside crowdstorming, in our article What is Ideation – and How to Prepare for Ideation Sessions.
A great crowdstorming challenge asks a clear, inspiring question that’s broad enough to allow creativity but specific enough to focus responses. Use “How might we…” prompts to invite open exploration, such as, “How might we help parents manage screen time more effectively?” Avoid technical jargon or internal goals. Instead, frame the problem from a user perspective.
Make the topic relevant and emotionally resonant. Set constraints, too: What’s in scope? What’s out? Give examples of good submissions to set expectations. The goal is to spark ideas that align with real user problems and are feasible for your team to build or refine later.
Discover further insights into how to approach design problems, in our article Product Thinking is Problem Solving.
Crowdstorming thrives on scale, so aim for at least 50 to 100 active participants to ensure a diverse set of ideas and meaningful engagement. Larger numbers improve idea variety and feedback quality, but they also increase the need for clear structure and moderation.
The ideal number depends on your goals, platform capacity, and time available to review submissions. For smaller or niche problems, a highly targeted crowd of 20–50 experts or loyal users may suffice. However, most successful crowdstorming campaigns engage thousands. The more voices you include, the richer the creative input you can get and the higher the chance of breakthrough ideas.
Find a treasure trove of helpful insights by checking out a related area in workshops in UX/UI design.
Target people who experience the problem you’re trying to solve. This could include existing customers, early adopters, hobbyists, or online communities passionate about your domain. Their real-world context gives authenticity to the ideas.
Avoid limiting participation to experts only; novices often see problems in fresh ways. Consider reaching out to niche forums, Reddit communities, or mailing lists to recruit. Incentivize participation with recognition, small rewards, or a chance to influence future products.
Understand that you’re not just sourcing ideas; you’re building relationships with co-creators, too. A crowd that’s both diverse and relevant brings deeper insight and more innovative, user-centered solutions.
Explore user behavior to unlock a wealth of insights about what people might want when faced with a design problem you’re considering.
Use an online platform which is designed for open idea sharing and feedback. Structure submissions with clear fields, with title, description, optional visuals, to standardize input. Allow public comments and votes so the crowd can react and iterate on each other’s ideas.
Make sure the interface encourages browsing, not just posting. Tag and categorize ideas to make review easier later. Monitor the platform regularly and engage participants with feedback and prompts to refine ideas. Don’t let submissions sit in silence; crowdstorming thrives on interaction, not isolation. Your goal with it is to create a living ecosystem of evolving ideas, not just a list. When you take things to the people this way, what you get back can not only bust incorrect assumptions but also democratize design in an informed way that can guide the best product for the purpose of its true users.
Speaking of assumptions, discover a wealth into another effective approach in our piece on Learn How to Use the Challenge Assumptions Method.
Use both crowd-based input and expert review. Start with upvotes or user comments to identify popular or provocative ideas. Then apply internal evaluation criteria: feasibility, alignment with business goals, and user impact. Use a simple scoring system (such as 1–5) across key dimensions.
Consider running short surveys with real users to validate top ideas. Look for ideas that sparked discussion or evolved through feedback, as that shows real engagement. Last, but not least, involve cross-functional teams to weigh in on technical and strategic fit. The best ideas won’t just be creative; they’ll solve real problems in practical, valuable ways, too, for both users and your organization.
Explore how to use surveys as a powerful tool to shed light on what works and what doesn’t in design, in our article User Experience (UX) Surveys: The Ultimate Guide.
Yes, crowdstorming complements other UX tools beautifully. Use journey mapping to uncover friction points, and then crowdstorm around specific problem areas. Once you collect ideas, apply affinity diagrams to group them by theme, feature, or user need.
You can use personas (research-based, synthetic representations of real users) to guide the crowdstorming brief, too, and ensure that ideas target real users. After ideation, methods like dot voting or MoSCoW prioritization help sort what’s most valuable.
Blending crowdstorming with these methods adds depth to the process: crowdstorming brings breadth of ideas, while structured UX tools bring clarity and focus. Put them together and they can make ideation more inclusive and insights more actionable.
Find out more about personas and you’ll understand why you’ll want to design with them to help bring better outcomes for your users and brand.
For all its power, crowdstorming can quickly produce too many ideas, making evaluation overwhelming. To manage this, group similar suggestions, apply voting, and set clear filtering criteria.
Beware of groupthink, where participants echo popular ideas; it can stifle originality. Platforms that allow anonymous posting or highlight underdog ideas can reduce this. Another challenge is off-topic or impractical submissions. Avoid this by clearly defining your brief and providing examples.
Last, but not least, contributors may disengage if they feel ignored. So, keep the crowd updated on what happens with their ideas. Recognize contributions, show progress, and close the loop. A well-facilitated crowdstorm prevents chaos and turns collective creativity into real product value.
Explore the potential for one design “peril” and how to avoid it in our article The Bandwagon Bias – The Dangers of Groupthink.
Jaafar, N., & Dahanayake, A. (2015). Software architecture for collaborative crowd-storming applications. In A. Bouguettaya, M. Levene, & H. K. Lu (Eds.), New trends in databases and information systems (pp. 268–278). Springer.
This peer-reviewed conference paper presents a reference software architecture for “crowd-storming” platforms: systems designed to coordinate large-scale collaborative idea generation online. Jaafar and Dahanayake identify the limitations of existing crowdsourcing approaches for ideation, particularly in terms of system flexibility, participant coordination, and workflow integration. Their proposed architecture supports ideation aggregation, user coordination, and adaptability for various crowd tasks. This work is significant for UX designers interested in systems that facilitate distributed creativity. Though the study is grounded in software architecture, its implications directly affect interaction design, workflow logic, and user engagement strategies in large-scale ideation systems.
Abrahamson, S., Ryder, P., & Unterberg, B. (2013). Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving. John Wiley & Sons.
This book introduces the concept of “crowdstorming,” engaging large, external crowds, rather than just internal employees or partners, in ideation and problem-solving. It covers how organizations can design, recruit, motivate and manage large-scale idea generation efforts, discussing topics such as intellectual property, incentives, community building and online platforms. With numerous case studies and a practical lifecycle model, it’s influential because it translates the abstract idea of “crowdsourcing” into a concrete strategy for innovation in today’s interconnected world.
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