Wicked problem
This article has been written for the prework assignment of Ironhack — fulltime UX bootcamp in March 2022.
This work is based on a design thinking process and includes UX and UI design. It consists on researching very precisely the wicked problem in order to improve people’s experience. The goal is to focus on understanding deeply the specific problem and the research process rather than creating a perfect prototype and finding an ideal solution.
Methodology
Wicked problem challenge was my first project as a student in UX design. All problems, findings, and research are real. It was made in 5 days from research to final prototype in collaboration with 2 more students to whom I would like to thank for a great team work!
Choosing our wicked problem
As a main topic of our project we chose the following area:
Culture & Heritage
Since the 70s, museums and other public institutions have been suffering a profound crisis. In the heart of this kind of institution, there’s the mission of making heritage accessible for all.
They build the bridges between objects and people, for them to be enjoyed by citizens. How Might We help museums and other public institutions bring people closer and fulfill their mission to preserve and activate cultural heritage in the 21st century?
We started our research by defining the main goal:
How can we bring people closer to the mission of preserving cultural heritage and improve their experience.
EMPHATIZE
We started our research with exploring and framing the problem related to people’s experience and their approach to culture & heritage. Because the subject was complex and multi-level we went through the brainstorming and created a short lean canvas survey. We wrote down all our ideas and answered some important questions in a lead canvas map which helped us to structure the information prepare the interview. The important part here was focusing on empathizing with users through user research.
We asked ourselves the following questions:
What do we need to learn:
- How might we help museums and other public institutions bring people closer and fulfill their mission to preserve and activate cultural heritage?
Who do we need to learn from?
- People +16
- No museum goers
- Museum goers
What information do we know already?
- People don’t understand what they’re seeing in museums.
- Art is alive but museums aren’t connecting well to the audience.
- People aren’t as interested in their heritage and culture as they used to be, maybe because they don’t understand it and therefore aren’t interested.
- People need a more accessible way to understand their culture and heritage.
How do we reach these people?
- Slack survey channel
- Personal ways (facebook, whatssup)
- Facebook survey groups
DEFINE
Second step of our research was preparing an online interview. We formulated 10 different questions (most of them open so we could deeply understand people’s experience and approach to the problem) and using Google Forms created a short interview platform. All our survey was focused on people’s approach to the museum and their experience of visiting museums and other cultural institutions. We got answers from 55 different people (all of them +16) about the following issues:
- Do you think you know enough about your roots and heritage?
- How often do you visit a museum or other public institutions?
- Do you enjoy the experience of visiting a museum or public institution?
- What would make you want to frequently visit a museum?
- Do you think museums make the information about an exhibit accessible to the viewer?
- When you see an exhibit have you felt any emotional connections to it? Why?
- Is art history and culture a topic that interests you?
- Are you interested in preserving cultural heritage? If yes, how do you think you would do that?
Affinity Diagram
We got 55 responses and here are some of the most important findings:
- 72% of the people said that cultural heritage is important for them.
- 23% of the people think they don’t know enough about their roots and heritage.
- 44% of interviewers go to museum once every 6 months.
After we gathered all the information, the next step was to synthesize and analyze our data. Our goal here was creating a point of view that was based on users needs and insights. Using an affinity diagram helped us organize the information into different groups based on people’s answers. By doing this we could physically see trends in our gathered information and select the most relevant one. We started by writing repeated data and quotes from the answers in sticky notes. Then, we organized them and placed together in the following groups:
- Engagement
- Experience
- Opinions
- Democratic factors
The organized data showed us the repeating patterns and important themes. Thanks to that we could continue the research with How Might We Statements and Problem Statements.
Here are our four problem statements that we decided to focus on:
- People want more exciting and personal experiences when visiting museums.
- People would like more accessible options and quicker rotation times to see more and experience new topics.
- People want to learn and preserve as much as they can about culture and heritage but struggle to do so.
- Not everyone has time or access to visit museums on a regular basis. But they would like to.
‘Every problem is an opportunity for design. By framing your challenge as a How Might We question, you’ll set yourself up for an innovative solution’ IDEO
We started this fase by creating different HMW Statements (How Might We) — small but mighty questions that allowed us to reframe our insights into opportunity areas and innovate on problems found during our research.
Here’s the list of the statements we selected:
- How might we create exciting and thrilling experiences for users to engage better?
- How might we help museums rotate faster to provide more experiences and more knowledge to their users?
- How might we supply accessible options for users to participate in learning and preserving culture?
- How might we create a way for people to have a museum on-the-go?
- How might we create opportunities for people with little time or money to have access to exhibitions?
Empathy Map
To make sure we got a good understanding of the problem, we continue our research with the empathy map. It’s a method used to synthesize rational and sentimental aspects of our users through their situation, acts and feelings in order to gain a deeper insight into their customers.
Among others we tried to answer the following questions:
- Who are we empathizing with?
- What do they say?
- What do they hear?
- What do they feel?
The empathy map gave us a vision of two different groups characterized in the following way:
GROUP 1.
- Interested about the culture and often visit museums.
- More flexibility with their time/money.
- Promoter of art, culture and heritage in their lifestyle.
- “Information at museums it’s accessible but could be improved”.
- “It would be better if there were more exhibits and shorter rotation time”.
- “Information is accessible but could me more”.
- Interested in preserving cultural heritage.
- “The world is forever changing and it’s important to know about the past”.
- Millennials.
- Live in a city.
- Big part of free time spent on social media.
GROUP 2
- Family person.
- Full time job & daily routine.
- Prefer things that do not diverge from from a routine.
- Their situation causes them to be uninterested about the culture and heritage.
- Passive.
- Economical barriers.
- They would enjoy more museum more with family.
- They feel like they know enough about their heritage.
- They would visit museums more if the exhibits were more fun and interactive.
User persona
The next step of our research was creating the Users Personas. They are important because they help to find pain-points and opportunities during the research phase. It helped us summarize our findings and align our strategy to a specific user type which in our case was user from “Group 2”.
Journey Map
Once we finalized the User Persona, we passed to the next stage in defining the problems that our users were facing and created a Journey Map.
User main expectations: having an educational visit at the museum as well as a thrilling experience.
“A customer journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It’s used for understanding and addressing customer needs and pain points”
Nielsen Norman Group
In our Journey Map we described the actions that the user had to take during his experience and name the tasks and emotions presented during this process. After this, it was more clear for us to see where the user experienced low points, which we showed with sad face icons. Then we identified the opportunities that were a previous step to write a hypothesis statement.
Problem Statements
Once we finished our Journey Map, we developed two main pain problem statements.
- Young, culture-oriented people need a way to have more exciting and personal experiences when visiting museums because they’re struggling to stay engaged and feel deprived of exhibit options.
- People need to have accessible ways to find information on culture & heritage because they would like to engage but they don’t feel like they have the means to do so.
Hypothesis:
We believe that creating enjoyable and engaging experiences for culture-oriented people will achieve increased engagement in culture and heritage. We will know we are right when more people feel that culture and heritage is interesting to be a part of and they think it is easily accessible.
IDEATE
The Ideation stage is all about this process. We focused here on generating lots of ideas before we select and develop the concepts. To practise the “Idea generation process” we brainstormed our ideas and perspectives. We realized a few very useful exercises such as Crazy 8s and dot voting.
The ideation process helped us to get obvious solutions out of our heads, and finally drove us to build low-fi and mid-fi prototype of our Culture — focused App
Takeaways
The most important lesson for me during this challenge was learning from my own mistakes and focusing more on the whole process than on the singular solution. Although I found it a little bit challenging working remotely in a research group project, I am very grateful to my amazing team for going together through this short journey and at the end having fun!