In journalism school, you learn a good news story will always include details about the who, what, where, when, and why of a news item. The sixth element of a good story is the how, but more on that later. I didn’t know then that my April O’Neil aspirations introduced me to a basic framework for understanding people and events in any number of settings.
After beginning a career in experience design, I realized that very few projects that don’t understand and incorporate the Five W’s will be successful. As a designer, I use the Five W’s as an approach to better understand complex problems and create human-centered design concepts. This approach is an empowering way to work with other people. It doesn’t assume that people can’t accomplish a task because they aren’t smart, but that we need to understand how people think, and what their context is.
I like to compare using the 5W’s and the how to building a house. The 5W’s are the materials we use to build the house.
A little more about each W and how we need it to build the house:
Why?
‘Why’ is one of the most important design questions. I once heard Jared Spool give a talk at UX Camp DC, and he said that if you ask any team member on a project why a user needs or wants to accomplish a task and they can tell you the answer, it will be a successful project. The why should drive all of our design decisions.
Who?
‘Who’ is the person or people that need or want to accomplish something.
What?
‘What’ is the task that needs to be accomplished. If you’ve ever felt frustrated by a service, a website, or a machine, you probably thought ‘I don’t think that X understands how I would do this.’ Looking at you, old DC Metro cars. Lots of advertisements in the cars and no maps? If the task is to navigate to a specific place, how do I know where I am and where to get off?
Where?
‘Where’ might be the physical or digital space where an interaction happens. Where should include context. It may be easy for someone to call a help desk when they are in their office, but is the same person likely to call the help desk from a cellphone while they’re out in the field?
When?
‘When’ is about sequence. You can’t ask someone to check out on a website before they’ve entered their payment details.
How?
If the Five W’s are the bricks that we need to build a house, the frame of the house is the how. Once we have the 5 W’s, we use the how to give the house its shape. Designers and technologists are the architects of the how. Spoiler alert — creating the how is one of the most fun parts of our job! The future how is something we get to shape, changing the way people interact with a service, or even a government agency. Given an understanding of the Five W’s, there are infinite ways to get to the how. This takes collaboration between design and technology.
Just like the bricks and the frame need each other to create a sturdy house, a human-centered design needs the 5W’s and the how to create a successful product.
It is a daunting task to build a ‘design’ house, but the Five W’s give us a starting point. The fun challenge of each project is bringing them together. So, thanks Professor English and Professor Miller for drilling us on the 5W’s, they’ve helped me more than you know.
This article is based on my human-centered design workshop from the 2017 Tech Lady Hackathon in Washington, DC. Thanks to all of the inspirational tech ladies who participated in the event.
