Feel the Pain

I always have this question. How to find a problem? How to understand in the current context that these are challenges an end-user is facing or business-user or developer is facing while doing their work.

I have realized that there are 3 ways to find a problem :

1. You yourself experience that and you see that there are personas that have the impact of the problem and you solve that.
2. The second way is to figure out is by asking them, the easiest way right is to interview them or observe them or do some User Research Experiments to really find out the depth of the problem.
3. The third way is to see what competitors are doing and what insight they have figured out and built the same product to take a pie from the market.

The above ways are towards opinionated ways of researching the problem and finding a product-market fit.

Another way is Data-Driven way to find a problem.

Let me give you an example :

I recently came across a startup which is funded by Y-Combinator, their name is Code Stream Code Review and what they do is: They Simplify Code Review in your IDE.

But what they observed was that in the Current Process :

1. A User has to push code to Github.
2. Create a Dev Branch
3. Create Pull Request
4. And Perform a Comparison & Code Review (Which is mostly Manual Still)

What they Did is :

They bought Code Review in the IDE, Now no need of Context Switching, You can do Code Review within your IDE.

Now what I am trying to say and observe here, they listed down the steps in the business process a user has to do and what they did is reduced a few of the steps.

Now here they had the clarity of the business process.

To achieve that clarity there is no specific data or metrics as such on how much steps the user previously used to take to reach to that stage or how much time user is spending from going to IDE to push it to GitHub and then creating a pull request and doing a review and then solving it.

All these data are coming from experiences, opinions, interviews, UR Methods and most of them from observations that are leading people to create new products to solve the challenges

What if we had data for each and every business process or steps the user is taking and make user or organization or consumer aware of it, we could easily understand how to bring new products, fill the gaps and solve the existing problems

And that leads me to a term that is User Behaviour Mining or Process Mining. Such tools can discover a new set of improvements and products that will improve Customer Experience.

This could also be a great benefit to Automation and Testing Industry as they would be easily able to understand in real-time the Coverage and Scope of the product that will help them to automate and create new test-cases to improve the reliability and quality of the product.

Going forward having a tool in place for Desktop, Web & Mobile and also towards IoT(i.e. Devices) will help to understand Customer Experience that will solve current challenges, at the same time having data about Business Processes which will give process analytics and in turn, will bring new products in the market to fill or reduce those gaps.

Combining Experience and Data-Driven we can uncover a new set of challenges that will introduce new products in the market.