How to transform interview notes into design challenge to ideate solutions

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Ideation requires a well-defined problem that we work to solve — a design challenge. One way to transform raw interviews data into a design challenge for ideation — is to follow http://www.designkit.org/ by IDEO that suggests:

1. Download your learning
2. Find themes
3. Create insight statements
4. Compile “How might we” design challenge

1. Download your learning

Posting interview notes on the wall to download the learning

Since I am practicing Lean Startup, I am pretty lonely in my customer discovery journey. I felt I need to get partners, so I can get a reality check on what I am hearing from the field and what should be done next.

I have posted a call for designers and ,surprisingly, I have got few designers interested in helping me.

Thank you, Elisa Chen, you are a valuable partner and I deeply appreciate your involvement and experience.

So, we have organized a small to team to swift through the interviews notes and talk about the most memorable parts of the interviews. This way designers who weren’t in the interviews are able to get an idea what matters for the interviewees.

It’s best if every design member runs a couple of interviews to get a sense of the segment we are working on.

2. Find themes

While talking about interviews, the team write post-it notes and then we group them to define themes

As we have talked about interviews and the major highlights, my partner was downloading learning. She was writing what she was hearing as major takeaways on the post-it notes.

Once we have done all the stickies, we have grouped them by common themes and named the themes, such as:

• Alone/Isolation;
• Anger/Rage;
• Lack of sleep

(note: we are researching postpartum depression, hence the themes are emotionally charged)

3. Create insight statement

Transforming post-it notes into insight statements under each themes, followed by HWM stickies

Then my partner wrote inside each theme insight statements. The insight encapsulates post-it notes into a coherent sentence, such as:

4. Compile “How might we” design challenge

And finally, we have compiled a few “How might we” — HMW — statements that we need to focus in the next phase of the projects.

Each of our design team had nominated HMWs:

Another approach to state the problem is to use a customer profile from Value proposition design.

One of the supporting tools for Ideation is the persona that humanizes the problem and brings more context to people who about to generate tons of ideas to help the intended users.

Read next post where I will share creation (step-by-step ,as Alan Cooper instructs) of personas based on the conducted interviews.

This is a post from series #productdesign where I practice product design and customer development.

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