Creating Digital Products

Human-centered design offers problem solvers of any stripe a chance to design with communities, to deeply understand the people they’re looking to serve, to dream up scores of ideas, and to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actual needs.

In simple words, it’s a process that takes into account the ‘needs of real people’.

Although it always seems much more tempting to skip the ‘understanding of user’ phase and jump directly into finding solutions and implementing. But according to the founder of IDEO David Kelley and his brother Tom, in their book ‘Creative Confidence’ the brothers make it clear that framing your design challenge is of utmost importance to the design process. They advise to “step back to make sure you have unearthed the correct question, before starting to search for solutions.”

Similarly, conducting research and user interviews are of utmost importance to frame our problem statement before looking for a solution.

In this blog, we present some steps that help one easily understand the process and steps involved in coming up with a problem statement that is user centric.

Framing the Design Challenge

Framing the problem statement in a correct way is the key to easing other activities that follow.

Coming up with an actionable problem statement involves understanding the target users, their needs and other valuable insights about them. The problem statement should not itself contain a solution or point to a particular direction, rather it should provide a large scope for the teams to think about the possible solutions.

For ex : Rather than saying, we need to design a mobile app for this particular problem. We should rather include things like ‘ We need to find a way to solve this particular problem’. The first statement restricts us to thinking in terms of mobile app only, while some better solution might be overlooked in this case.

Consider the example of a meditating app that we are designing.

There is a six step process that can be used to frame the design problem:

1. Writing down the problem you want to solve in a single statement, that is short and conveys our intentions. Ex: Help people meditate and improve focus
2. Now, we try rephrasing the problem as a question that helps the team to think of some possible solutions. Ex: How can we help people meditate?
3. Decide the ultimate impact you want to have on the audience. Example : Help them to focus and reduce stress
4. Think of the possible solutions. If the problem statement is too narrow, it won’t offer many options to explore. While if it is too broad, it will confuse you from where to start thinking. Thinking of the solutions can help us scope our problem statement.
5. Analyse the problem with reference to the constraints and contexts.They could be geographic, technological, time-based, or have to do with the population you’re trying to reach. Ex : Busy life of people in cities leave them with very less time to meditate is a constraint
6. Iterating the above steps and tweaking the problem statement until we reach the required design challenge.

Interview the users

In order to know our customers better and to understand their problems and expectations from our product, interviewing is an effective way. Conducting interviews in the personal space of a person like their work of home, can help us know a lot about their lifestyle, mindset and problems they face. This can help us in turn to focus our solutions on the things that matter to our user base.

There are a few steps that should be followed while conducting interviews like:

1. In order to avoid overwhelming the interviewee, at max 3 people should conduct the interviews, each should have a clearly defined role.
2. Preparing a list of questions to ask beforehand saves time and avoids the issue of missing the important questions. Beginning with broad questions, about the person’s life like their jobs etc can help them get comfortable. This should then be followed by questions that focus on your problem statement and help one understand the hope, aspirations and fears of the users.
3. Interviewers tend to have their own interpretation of what the interviewee talked about. But it is to note down exactly what the interviewee meant and not one’s interpretation of their statement. The process of interviewing is based on active listening.
4. Understanding the interviewee’s body language, facial expressions and other social cues, can help to gather information that the interviewee might not directly convey. That is why conducting interviews in the comfort of interviewee’s place can help one gain many valuable insights.
5. Taking pictures of the surroundings and while interviewing, can help one to deduce some useful information in future. ( only if allowed )

Knowing the users well is of utmost importance to success of any product in today’s competitive world.