Unit – II

UNDERSTAND, OBSERVE AND DEFINE THE PROBLEM :Search field

determination - Problem clarification - Understanding of the problem -
Problem analysis - Reformulation of the problem - Observation Phase -
Empathetic design - Tips for observing - Methods for Empathetic Design -
Point-of-View Phase - Characterization of the target group - Description of
customer needs.

Problem clarification:
The Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem
Once you’ve empathized with your users, you can move on to the
second stage of the Design Thinking process and define the problem
your users need you to solve.

if you’ve read our introduction to User Experience (UX) Design, you’ll

know that UX is essentially about solving the problems that prevent users
from accomplishing what they want to do with our product.

Before you can go into problem-solving mode, however, there is one very
crucial step that you need to complete—one that will shape your entire
design project from start to finish. In the Design Thinking process, this
step is what’s known as the “define” stage.

As the second step in the Design Thinking process, the define stage is
where you’ll establish a clear idea of exactly which problem you will solve
for the user. You’ll then shape this into a problem statement which will act
as your northern star throughout the design process.
In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about this stage in
the Design Thinking process, as well as how to define a meaningful
problem statement.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. What is the define stage and why is it necessary?

2. What is a problem statement?
3. How to define a meaningful problem statement
4. What comes after the define phase?

1. What is the define stage and why is it necessary?

As the second step in the Design Thinking process, the define stage
is dedicated to defining the problem: what user problem will you be
trying to solve? In other words, what is your design challenge?
The define stage is preceded by the empathize phase, where you’ll
have learned as much about your users as possible, conducting
interviews and using a variety of immersion and observation
techniques. Once you have a good idea of who your users are and,
most importantly, their wants, needs, and pain-points, you’re ready to
turn this empathy into an actionable problem statement.
The relationship between the empathize and define stages can best
be described in terms of analysis and synthesis. In the empathize
phase, we use analysis to break down everything we observe and
discover about our users into smaller, more manageable
components—dividing their actions and behaviour into “what”, “why”
and “how” categories, for example. In the define stage, we piece
 these components back together, synthesising our findings to create
a detailed overall picture.

Why is the define stage so important?

The define stage ensures you fully understand the goal of your
design project. It helps you to articulate your design problem, and
provides a clear-cut objective to work towards. A meaningful,
actionable problem statement will steer you in the right direction,
helping you to kick-start the ideation process (see Stage Three of
the Design Thinking process) and work your way towards a
solution.

What is a problem statement?

A problem statement identifies the gap between the current state (i.e.
the problem) and the desired state (i.e. the goal) of a process or
product. Within the design context, you can think of the user problem as
an unmet need. By designing a solution that meets this need, you can
satisfy the user and ensure a pleasant user experience.

A problem statement, or point of view (POV) statement, frames this

problem (or need) in a way that is actionable for designers. It provides a
clear description of the issue that the designer seeks to address, keeping
the focus on the user at Problem or POV statements can take various
formats, but the end goal is always the same: to guide the design team
towards a feasible solution. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you might
frame your design problem:

• From the user’s perspective: “I am a young working professional

trying to eat healthily, but I’m struggling because I work long hours
 and don’t always have time to go grocery shopping and prepare my
meals. This makes me feel frustrated and bad about myself.”
• From a user research perspective: “Busy working professionals
need an easy, time-efficient way to eat healthily because they often
work long hours and don’t have time to shop and meal prep.”
• Based on the four Ws—who, what, where, and why: “Our young
working professional struggles to eat healthily during the week
because she is working long hours. Our solution should deliver a
quick and easy way for her to procure ingredients and prepare
healthy meals that she can take to work.”
• As you can see, each of these statements addresses the same
issue—just in a slightly different way. As long as you focus on the
user, what they need and why, it’s up to you how you choose to
present and frame your design problem.
• We’ll look at how to form your problem statement a little later on.
Before we do, let’s consider some problem statement “do”s and
“don’t”s.

What makes a good problem statement?

A good problem statement is human-centered and user-focused. Based on

the insights you gathered in the empathize phase, it focuses on the users
and their needs—not on product specifications or business outcomes. Here
are some pointers that will help you create a meaningful problem
statement:

• Focus on the user: The user and their needs should be front and
center of your problem statement. Avoid statements that start with
 “we need to…” or “the product should”, instead concentrating on the
user’s perspective: “Young working professionals need…”, as in the
examples above.
• Keep it broad: A good problem statement leaves room for innovation
and creative freedom. It’s important to keep it broad enough to invite
a range of different ideas; avoid any references to specific solutions
or technical requirements, for example.
• Make it manageable: At the same time, your problem statement
should guide you and provide direction. If it’s too broad in terms of the
user’s needs and goals, you’ll struggle to hone in on a suitable
solution. So, don’t try to address too many user needs in one problem
statement; prioritize and frame your problem accordingly.

How to solve problems using the design thinking process

Summary
The design thinking process is a problem-solving design methodology that
helps you develop solutions in a human-focused way. Initially designed at
Stanford’s d.school, the five stage design thinking method can help solve
ambiguous questions, or more open-ended problems. Learn how these five
steps can help your team create innovative solutions to complex problems.

As humans, we’re approached with problems every single day. But how
often do we come up with solutions to everyday problems that put the
needs of individual humans first?

This is how the design thinking process started.

What is the design thinking process?

The design thinking process is a problem-solving design methodology that

helps you tackle complex problems by framing the issue in a human-centric
way. The design thinking process works especially well for problems that
are not clearly defined or have a more ambiguous goal.

One of the first individuals to write about design thinking was John E.
Arnold, a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford. Arnold wrote about
four major areas of design thinking in his book, “Creative Engineering” in
1959. His work was later taught at Stanford’s Hasso-Plattner Institute of
Design (also known as d.school), a design institute that pioneered the
design thinking process.

This eventually led Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon to outline one of the
first iterations of the design thinking process in his 1969 book, “The
Sciences of the Artificial.” While there are many different variations of
design thinking, “The Sciences of the Artificial” is often credited as the
basis.

A non-linear design thinking approach

Design thinking is not a linear process. It’s important to understand that

each stage of the process can (and should) inform the other steps. For
example, when you’re going through user testing, you may learn about a
new problem that didn’t come up during any of the previous stages. You
may learn more about your target personas during the final testing phase,
or discover that your initial problem statement can actually help solve even
more problems, so you need to redefine the statement to include those as
well.
The design thinking process is a never-ending iterative process. Your
design team can choose when the user’s needs are met to form a final
product, or they can choose to iterate on the design to create alternate
variations that solve for different needs.

Why use the design thinking process

The design thinking process is not the most intuitive way to solve a
problem, but the results that come from it are worth the effort. Here are a
few other reasons why implementing the design thinking process for your
team is worth it.

Focus on problem solving

As human beings, we often don’t go out of our way to find problems. Since
there’s always an abundance of problems to solve, we’re used to solving
problems as they occur. The design thinking process forces you to look at
problems from many different points of view.

The design thinking process requires focusing on human needs and

behaviors, and how to create a solution to match those needs. This focus
on problem solving can help your design team come up with creative
solutions for complex problems.

Encourages collaboration and teamwork

The design thinking process cannot happen in a silo. It requires many
different viewpoints from designers, future customers, and
other stakeholders. Brainstorming sessions and collaboration are the
backbone of the design thinking process.

Foster innovation

The design thinking process focuses on finding creative solutions that cater
to human needs. This means your team is looking to find creative solutions
for hyper specific and complex problems. If they’re solving unique
problems, then the solutions they’re creating must be equally unique.

The iterative process of the design thinking process means that the
innovation doesn’t have to end—your team can continue to update the
usability of your product to ensure that your target audience’s problems are
effectively solved.

Understanding of the problem:

Observation Phase:
Point Of View – Problem Statement
A Point Of view (POV) is a meaningful and actionable problem
statement, which will allow you to ideate in a goal-oriented manner. Your
POV captures your design vision by defining the RIGHT challenge to
address in the ideation sessions. A POV involves reframing a design
challenge into an actionable problem statement. You articulate a POV by
combining your knowledge about the user you are designing for, his or her
needs and the insights which you’ve come to know in your research or
Empathise mode. Your POV should be an actionable problem statement
that will drive the rest of your design work.
You articulate a POV by combining these three elements – user, need,
and insight. You can articulate your POV by inserting your information
about your user, the needs and your insights in the following sentence:

[User . . . (descriptive)] needs [need . . . (verb)] because [insight. . .

(compelling)]

“How Might We” Questions:

When you’ve defined your design challenge in a POV, you can start to
generate ideas to solve your design challenge. You can start using your
POV by asking a specific question starting with: “How Might We” or “in
what ways might we”. How Might We (HMW) questions are questions that
 have the potential to spark ideation sessions such as brainstorms. They
should be broad enough for a wide range of solutions, but narrow enough
that specific solutions can be created for them. “How Might We” questions
should be based on the observations you’ve gathered in the Empathise
stage of the Design Thinking process.
For example, you have observed that youths tend not to watch TV
programs on the TV at home, some questions which can guide and spark
your ideation session could be:

• How might we make TV more social, so youths feel more engaged?

• How might we enable TV programs to be watched anywhere, at anytime?
• How might we make watching TV at home more exciting?
The HMW questions open up to Ideation sessions where you explore
ideas, which can help you solve your design challenge in an innovative way

The Take Away

The second stage in a typical Design Thinking process is called

the Define phase. It involves collating data from the observation stage (first
stage called Empathise) to define the design problems and challenges. By
using methods for synthesising raw data into a meaningful
and usable body of knowledge — such as empathy mapping and space
saturate and group — we will be able to create an actionable design
problem statement or Point of View that inspire the generation of ideas to
solve it. The How Might We questions open up to Ideation sessions where
you explore ideas, which can help you solve your design challenge in an
innovative way.

Characterization of the target group:

Can you get by without doing a target group analysis?

The short answer is no. Without a target group analysis, you run the risk of
your website failing to reach your potential customers or your ads being
displayed to the wrong audience. The result will be high levels of wasted
coverage for your ads and costs per click, as well as high bounce rates for
 your website. Potential customers won’t get to see your advertising and
your marketing measures will fail to hit the mark.

It’s essential that your marketing reaches the appropriate people for your
product or service. To accomplish this, you have to be familiar with their
needs, lifestyle, and buying behavior, and you need to know how to trigger
certain emotions in them. This is where a target group analysis comes in –
and you can conduct one in just three steps.

Step 1 of the target group analysis: Determine the target group

Start by deciding whether your marketing is aimed at companies (B2B) or

consumers (B2C). If you want to reach consumers, you can use the
following attribute template to classify them:

• Demographics: Define general characteristics such as age, gender,

marital status, place of residence, and household size.
• Socioeconomics: Research the level of education, income, and scope of
your target group, as well as their profession.
• Psychographics: Motivation, opinions, wishes, values, hobbies, lifestyle,
and daily routine are important factors when defining your target group.
• Buying behavior: How does your target group make purchases? What are
its characteristics in terms of price sensitivity, satisfaction, purchasing
scope, media usage?

If your target group focuses on companies, use this template to assign

attributes:

• Organizational: Determine the company’s size, location, industry, and

market share.
• Economic: Research their fixed and current assets and the use of financial
resources.
• Buying behavior: Try to establish when the company makes purchases
and whether it has a regular supplier base.
• Modernity: What do you know about the company’s attitude to innovation
and the level of its digital transformation?

Define it using the following characteristics: goals, needs, priorities, and

problems.
 Your marketing will only be successful if you can offer your target group
added value. Your campaign will only deliver results if your target group
has a reason to buy your products or book your service. It’s important that
you make your target group feel that it’s in the right place, and to achieve
that, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• Whose problem/problems can I solve?

• Whose needs can I meet?
• Who can I make happier, better, richer, stronger, healthier, or more
satisfied?
• Who else do I offer added value to?

Step 2 of the target group analysis: Analyze buying behavior

Once you’ve defined your target group for your marketing, you should then
analyze this target group and their buying behavior in more detail. This is
an important step so you can

• identify the right pricing and price models (subscription, scale of prices,
etc.),
• find the right way to address them,
• design the right media strategy,
• select the right marketing strategy, and
• use the right marketing and sales channels.

Think about the needs of your customer group. How can you positively
influence their decision to make a purchase? Use the answers to both
these questions to shape the design of your website and how you address
your potential customers.

Step 3 of the target group analysis: Generate even more data

You’ve found your target group and analyzed their buying behavior. But
how can you actually reach them? Ask yourself where the people in your
target group are active online, what appeals to them, do they still read
things or do they now simply scan though content. Find out which social
networks they use, whether they like reading text, and what kind of images
they enjoy. Which channels do they use to make purchases and what
advertising/marketing strategies appeal to them?
There’s no shortage of information for your target group analysis: you can
use surveys, interviews, and statistics, and plenty of research on this topic
is available online. But as already discussed, the most important sources
are definitely surveys that you conduct yourself. Ask your customers and
targets – and listen to their answers! Evaluate their responses to newsletter
and social media campaigns, use that information to keep refining your
target group, and make sure that your information is always up to date.

Description of customer needs:

CUSTOMER NEEDS THROUGH DESIGN THINKING

Once you’ve assessed user needs, find ways to meet them. Although there
are several tools you can use to find solutions, design thinking is among
the most effective.

Design thinking is a solutions-based, human-centric mindset. It's an

empathetic method that involves strategizing and designing innovative
solutions based on insights gleaned from observations and research

• Clarify: This stage focuses on clarifying a problem by conducting

research to empathize with your target audience. The goal is to identify
key pain points, enabling you to find the right solution.
• Ideate: The ideation stage focuses on idea generation to solve problems
identified during your initial research. This stage requires overcoming
biases to ensure innovative ideas.
• Develop: The development stage involves exploring potential solutions
generated during ideation. Prototyping is used to validate a solution's
effectiveness.
• Implement: The final stage is implementation. This involves advocating
for a developed idea to stakeholders and encouraging its adoption at
your organization.

Within this framework are parallels between assessing customer needs and
design thinking’s clarify stage. Both require research and observation that
ultimately lead to empathizing with the consumer. This intersection is why
design thinking can be leveraged to develop innovations that serve
customer needs.

WHAT DO CUSTOMERS WANT?

After collecting and organizing observations around customer needs and

solutions, you can analyze your data for further insights, such as
overlooked pain points, latent needs, or new problem framing. This final
step is vital to understanding your customers fully. It’s also closely related
to creative problem-solving—another effective innovation tool you can
leverage to improve customers’ experiences.

Finding ways to make customers happy doesn't have to be complicated. If

you solve their problems and give them what they need, they’re likely to not
only purchase from you once but multiple times thereafter.

Identify customer needs

Step 1: Decide on a target segment.

This is something obvious, but really difficult to nail. Let’s say you’re starting
Airbnb, you cannot conquer the world on day one. You need to start small,
you need to start somewhere — in their case, (i) it was apartments listed on
Craigslist for the initial supply, and (ii) travelers looking for short term
accommodation while attending conferences [3].

The more specific and identifiable your target segment, the less time it will
take to understand their needs. A quick gauge — can you think of at least
10 people who fit the profile you have in mind?
In practice, it’s quite difficult to have this nailed down right from the
beginning. So let’s start with something broad let’s say “recruiters”.

Step 2: Identify their ‘jobs-to-be-done’.

The ‘jobs to be done’ [4] is a simple, but really effective framework to

understand customer needs. In essence, the theory is, ‘people hire a
product or service to do a job they want to get done’. For example, I use
Airbnb to book travel online, I take Uber to get to work.

You can start by Googling “a day in the life of ________”. There are loads of
people who have written blogs about how they spend their day at work. Its
the quickest was to start identifying what “jobs” your target segment needs
to get done. Example — A day in the life of a recruiter [5]. Once you read
through 5–10 of such entries, you’ll have an initial list of things they get
done every day.

If your target segment is more specific (which is a good thing) this quick
hack may not work. You can conduct user interviews with your target
segment and ask them to describe a day in their life. The goal at this point is
just to get a list of things that your target segment ‘gets done’ regularly.

At first, it might seem that it’s just a bunch of random things they’re talking
about. And you can’t really tell what the “jobs” they’re trying to get done
through the day. You can start making sense of this data by applying
thematic analysis. Which is an iterative process of categorizing the data
from your research into “jobs”, evaluating if those categories make sense?

Here’s an example from — A day in the life of a recruiter

Code the jobs you find.

“And so I begin a passive search. I try not to rely too much on job boards,
so I hit up the holy grail of recruiting — LinkedIn. I start with my network,
looking for referrals, and then expand out into the cold calling abyss.”

The jobs: search candidates, source candidates.

I’ve written about how to apply how thematic analysis to user interviews
over here [6] — you can apply the same process to identify jobs-to-be-done
from your user interviews. It’s worth the effort to do the analysis because, by
the end of it, you’ll start getting an idea of things like which jobs are done
more frequently, which ones take up a lot of time, which ones are the most
common across people in your target segment.

Understand how they currently get things done.

With your initial analysis, you’ll have a starting point to dig deeper. Not
every job they do will be relevant to your product or service at that time. So
think about the objectives that are driving your business forward and start
digging deeper.
For example, let’s say that you’re building a recruitment platform. And you
identify recruiters have three key jobs “source candidates”, “filter
candidates” and “share candidates” which you want to serve.

Interview users about how they do that job.

Pick one and dig deeper by talking to people in your target segment. Ask
them how they get that job done. Here are some questions to ask when
getting started:

• Can you describe the last time you did _____?

• How much time do you spend doing _____?

• How often do you do _____?

• What is the hardest part of doing ______?

• Do you use any tools to help you do ______?

Asking these questions should help you build an understanding of the

“job(s)” you’ve chosen to focus on. Based on their answers you can start
working out (i) what their goals are for that “job” and, (ii) how they currently
go about getting it done.

The goals are usually some sort an optimization problem the customers are
trying to solve. While “sourcing candidates” the recruiters’ goal could be
something like — “reach out to as many relevant candidates as possible, in
the least amount of time possible”. The element of optimization opens them
up to new solutions. The solutions help them achieve those goals in a
cheaper or faster way.

Identify pain-points/problems.

Customer needs are the specific challenges they face while trying to get
their job(s) done. These challenges lead to inefficiencies in achieving their
goals. Here are a couple of possible examples while “posting job
descriptions on online job boards”:

• “manually having to post on multiple job-boards”

• “not having a central place to view all candidates across job boards”

These could be problems in their existing way of doing things. They cause
inefficiencies in the job of “sourcing candidates”.
Discovering customer needs is an iterative process.

Identifying needs and understanding the customers’ job(s) is an iterative

process. Sometimes you may discover that the initial definition of your
target market wasn’t quite right. Or your definition of their jobs wasn’t
accurate. But over time, your research helps you classify them better and
improve your understanding of their needs.

Let’s say you started with “recruiters” as your target segment. Within a few
interviews, you’ll realize that each of their jobs seems to be different. This
should nudge you to improve your segmentation and classify them better.
Perhaps as “headhunters”, “smb recruiters”, and “those in charge of
graduate programs”. Pick one to focus on and continue.

Evaluate customer needs with experiments

Step 1: Formulate a theory.

Let’s say you completed a few interviews and have observed that “manually
having to post on multiple job-boards” is a problem faced by recruiters in
your target segment. Use these observations to formulate a theory about
the behavior of your target segment.
For Airbnb, their theory about the customer needs was “price is an
important concern for customers booking travel online, hotels leave them
disconnected from the city and it’s a culture. No easy way exists to book a
room with a local or become a host.”

In our example, the theory can be “smb recruiters want to source

candidates from multiple job boards, but don’t have an easy way to list their
posting on multiple boards”.

Step 2: Make a prediction about their behavior.

Now that you have an amazing theory about the customers’ needs based
on your research and observations. It’s likely to be true, but what if it isn’t?

Nearly ⅔ of all the money spent on building software generates an

underwhelming ROI($400B/yr wasted) [7]. 80% of the features that get built
never get used [8]. Companies end up spending a lot of time and money
into solving a problem that isn’t interesting and doesn’t help in achieving
your business objectives.

Generate hypotheses

The most efficient way to minimize that risk is to evaluate the need by
making a prediction about measurable customer behavior, and seeing if it
holds up to actual evidence. For Airbnb, the prediction was — “we will find
several listings for temporary housing on non-purpose built websites.”