3. Definición -DT -GPS

3. Definición -DT -GPS
Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process – Define
the Problem by Synthesising Information
An essential part of the Design Thinking process is the Define phase as this is the phase where
you will explicitly express the problem that you and your team aim to address. In Design
Thinking, the first phase is the research or Empathise phase, and then you move on to the
Define phase, where you will use a wide variety of methods to help crystallise your essential
findings from the research phase. Your goal is to synthesise and develop an understanding of
who exactly you’re designing for and what your users really need. In order to be innovative
and be able to create significant results which matter to your users, you must first define a
specific and compelling problem statement, which you can then use as a guide for the solution
that you are seeking to design.
“Two goals of the define mode are to develop a deep understanding of your users and the
design space and, based on that understanding, to come up with an actionable problem
statement.”
– d.school, Bootcamp Bootleg
In the Define mode, your goal is to define a meaningful and actionable problem statement,
which you and your team can focus on solving. The Define mode is about understanding the
meaningful challenge you should address and the insights that you can—and should—
leverage in your design work.
When you learn how to master the definition of your problem or design challenge by
constructing a problem statement, it will greatly improve your Design Thinking process
and result. Why?—a precise definition of your problem statement will guide you and your
team’s work and kick-start the ideation process in the right direction. It will invite clarity
and focus into the design space. On the contrary, if you don’t pay enough attention to
defining, you will work like a blind man stumbling in the dark.
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
What is Defining?
In the Define mode, you and your team will collect the information gathered during the first
stage of the Design Thinking process, the Empathise stage. In the Define mode, you will
analyse your observations and synthesise them so as to define the core problems you and
your team have identified up to this point.
“The define mode is when you unpack and synthesise your empathy findings into
compelling needs and insights, and scope a specific and meaningful challenge. It is a mode
of ‘focus’ rather than ‘flaring.’”
– d.school, Bootcamp Bootleg
The Define Mode is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as
the definition of a problem will require that you synthesise your observations about your
users from the first stage, the Empathise Stage, in the Design Thinking process.
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Tim Brown, CEO of international design consultancy firm IDEO, wrote in his book Change by
Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, that
analysis and synthesis are “equally important, and each plays an essential role in the process
of creating options and making choices.”
Analysis in the Empathise Phase
Analysis is about breaking down complex concepts and problems into smaller, easier-tounderstand constituents. We do that, for instance, during the first stage of the Design
Thinking process, the Empathise stage, when we observe and document details relating to
our users.
“Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. The Empathize mode is
the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is
your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional
needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them.”
– d-school, An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE
The Empathise mode will help you to analyse, conduct relevant research, and become an
instant expert on the subject and gain invaluable empathy for the person you are designing
for.
Define and Synthesise in the Define Phase
Synthesis, on the other hand, is about creatively putting together your analysis and
research in order to form whole ideas. This takes place during the Define stage, during
which we organise, interpret, and make sense of the data we have gathered in order to
create a problem statement. It takes practice and hard work to generate a precise and
specific problem statement that makes sense of the widespread information we gathered
during the Empathise mode:
“The Define mode of the design process is all about bringing clarity and focus to the design
space. It is your chance, and responsibility, as a design thinker to define the challenge you
are taking on, based on what you have learned about your user and about the context.”
– d-school, An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE
Although we mentioned that analysis takes place during the Empathise stage and synthesis
takes place during the Define stage, they do not only happen during the distinct stages of
Design Thinking. In fact, analysis and synthesis often take place consecutively
throughout all stages of the Design Thinking process. Design Thinkers often analyse a
situation before synthesising new insights, and then analyse their synthesised findings
once more so as to create more, higher-level syntheses.
Methods which will Help you Synthesise Your Research and
Define Your Design Challenge
There is a wealth of effective and fun methods which will help you synthesise and make
sense of all the data you’ve gathered during your research. For example, it’s often relevant
to tell the most significant and surprising user stories. Often, you will want to bring all of
your data out into the open and visualise them in a mapping session with your fellow team
members. You will develop empathy maps and personas based on your research about
your users. You will immerse your personas in stories and flesh out the scenarios in which
they find themselves. Once you understand the full scope of your users’ worlds, you can
then form a problem bold statement which is also known as a Point Of View. You are then
ready to proceed with crystallising your problem statement into inspirational How Might
We questions. The How Might We questions will lead you on the way into the Ideation
sessions, which follow in the next and third phase of the Design Thinking process.
The Take Away
Analysis and synthesis are equally important. Each of them play an essential role in the
process of creating options, making choices and guiding you in defining your design
challenge in a problem statement. Analysis involves researching and breaking down
complex concepts and problems into smaller, easier-to-understand constituents. You will
analyse, research, and gain empathy for the person you are designing for in the Empathise
mode. Synthesis involves creatively putting your analysis and research pieces together in
order to form whole ideas. You synthesise in the Define phase: You organise, interpret,
discover connections and patterns and make sense of the data that you have gathered. Your
goal in the Define phase is to create a problem statement, also known as a Point Of view.
Your Point Of View will be your transit into crystallising inspirational How Might We
questions, which will lead you into the Ideation sessions, which follows as the next and
third phase of Design Thinking process.
References & Where to Learn More
IDEO, HCD Connect, Extract Key Insights Method
Guide: http://www.hcdconnect.org/methods/extract-key-insi...
OPEN IDEO, Design Challenges: https://openideo.com/challenge
d.school, Bootcamp Bootleg, 2011: http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/201...
Idea.org, Methods,
http://www.designkit.org/methods: http://www.designkit.org/methods
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: gdsteam. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
Methods to Help You Define Synthesise and Make
Sense in Your Research
So you’ve got piles of data gathered from the inspiring empathy research activities you’ve
undertaken, and you’re blankly staring at the data thinking, “Where to from here …?” and
“What do I do with all this information?” It’s time to bring all the research you’ve collected
together and make sense of it all within the context of the design challenge that you and your
team face. There are a variety of effective – and interesting – methods to help you synthesise
and make sense of all the data you’ve gathered during your research. In Design Thinking, the
first phase is the Research or Empathise phase, then you move on to the Define phase, in which
you utilise several available methods to help you crystallise, synthesise, and summarise your
understanding of who you’re designing for and what your users really need.
For example, you can tell significant and surprising user stories. You will often want to
bring all of your data out into the open and visualise it during mapping sessions with
team members. You can, for example, develop empathy maps and personas based on
your research about your users. It often makes sense to immerse your personas in
stories and flesh out the scenarios they find themselves in. Once you understand the
full scope of your users’ worlds, you can then form a problem statement which is also
known as a Point Of View. You then proceed to crystallising your problem statement
into inspirational How Might We questions. The How Might We questions will lead the
way into the Ideation sessions, which follow in the next and third phase of Design
Thinking process.
In the following section, we’ll provide an introduction to the best Define methods.
Share Inspiring User Stories
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
One way of making sense of your data is to share with your team the most inspiring
stories you’ve heard from the people you’re designing for. Think about user stories or
experiences that have stuck with you: stories which surprised you, made you curious, or
verified or falsified your assumptions. Please note, it’s also important to look for stories
which falsify your previous assumptions as you don’t want to risk moving forward just
confirming your own wishes without really paying attention to your users’ core stories
and needs. Stories will most likely not provide you with the ultimate solutions to your
design challenge, but chances are they’ll resonate with your team. At the international
design company IDEO, team members share inspiring stories with each other so that
user stories become part of their collective consciousness.
The goal is to build a repository of stories for your team to draw from, tell, and retell.
Capturing those resonant ideas and feelings, and building them into the very narrative
of your team’s work helps everyone down the line.
– IDEO.org
Best Practice: Construct Your User Story Madlib
Try to tell the most essential stories and consider them to be a series of steps within a
broader system.
•
•
•
As a [who are they], he/she wants to [what do they want to do], so that [their end
goal].
Example: As a freelance consultant, Peter wants to easily schedule meetings, so that
he can ensure his schedule is always organised and effective.
Example: As a corporate web designer, Lisa wants to improve the company’s
website, so that users can easily find and get access to what they need.
You can download and print the template for the method “Sharing Inspiring User
Stories” which you and your team can use as a guide.
Make sense in your Research by Creating Maps
When you’ve developed a complex dataset during your initial research in the Design
Thinking empathy mode, you will often have lots
of interviews, actions, experiences and other information – constructing a map is
generally a good method for making sense of the data. Mapping helps
plot experiences, customer journeys, thought processes, a series of activities or
actions and other related behaviour, as well as feelings, in one place. It would be
useless having reams of data and not be able to understand the essence of it by
extracting significant meaning from the data. This is a well-known issue in the business
sector and synthesing methods can help you solve that problem.
Affinity Diagrams and Space Saturate and Group – Clustering and
Bundling Ideas and Facts
The “space saturate and group” method’s goal is to get all of your observations and
findings into one place: Immerse yourself in the chaos of information you’ve gathered
during your research Empathise phase. Get all of the information out into the open and
get visual. Create a collage of all of your observations, data, experiences, interviews,
thoughts, insights, and stories. Write on post-its, drawyour insights, tell stories,
and share artifacts.
Your team should write and draw all relevant information on post-it notes and group the
items one-by-one. You should name the groups, rank the groups, and seek to
understand their relationships in order to condense insights, user needs, pain points, or
look for gaps you haven’t addressed yet.
The term “saturate” relates to the way everyone covers or saturates the “space” with
their images and notes in order to create a wall of information to inform and start
“grouping” the following problem-defining process. You then draw connections between
these individual elements, or nodes, join the dots and develop new and deeper insights,
which themselves help define the problem(s) and develop potential ideas for solutions.
In other words, you go from analysis to synthesis. The method is also known as Affinity
Diagram.
Get all of your information out into the open and visualise it during mapping sessions with
your team members, then try to build themes and understand needs. Rank your findings and
visualise connections to help you synthesise and make sense in your research results.
Empathy Map
An Empathy map will help you understand your user’s needs whilst developing a deeper
understanding of the person you are designing for. There are many techniques
available for you to develop this type of empathy. An Empathy Map is one method that
will help you define and synthesise your observations from your fieldwork and research
phase, and draw out insights about your users’ needs. An empathy map consists of four
quadrants, reflecting four key traits that the user possessed during the research stage.
The four quadrants refer to what the user: Said, Did, Thought, and Felt.
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
An empathy map consists of four quadrants which refer to what the users: Said, Did, Thought,
and Felt.
Personas
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Personas are fictional characters, which, based on your research, you create to
represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in
a similar way. When you create personas you will understand your
users’ needs, behaviours, and goals – it will help you step out of yourself. It helps you
recognise that different people have different needs and expectations, and it helps you
to identify with the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand
less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they help you achieve the goal of
creating a good user experience for your target user group.
Stories
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
User stories are short stories that aim to insert the Persona into a situation in which he
or she is using your product or aiming to fulfill the goal you seek to match. At this point,
you should ignore minor details and get to the root of the who, what and why of the
situation. Madlibs can be used to generate simple user stories which can serve as a
guiding tool to ensure that the solution you seek to design meets the user’s needs and
your insights about the user.
Scenarios
Scenarios expand on user stories and fill in many valuable human and environmental
factors, which flesh out the story providing much more meaning for exploring various
aspects of the solution. Scenarios provide us with the context within which our personas
function, and how their experiences and needs play out. It helps us to visualise the
Persona within a given context and how their various experiences play out. Scenarios
relate to specific needs that the Persona is trying to fulfill with associated detail and this
may prove helpful in understanding how to approach solutions.
Define Your Point Of View (POV)
Author/Copyright
holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
By the end of your Define mode, you should end up creating an actionable problem
statement, also known as your Point of View (POV). You form your Point of View by
extracting the most important insights about your users’ core human needs that you
should fulfill within the problem area you’re investigating and designing for. The POV
should not contain any specific solution, nor should it contain any indication as to how
those needs should be fulfilled. Instead, it should provide a wide enough scope for
imagining solutions, which go beyond status quo.
Frame Your POV with How Might We Questions
When you’ve defined your design challenge in a POV, you can start opening up for
ideas to solve your design challenge by asking “How Might We”. You’re now moving on
to the next phase of the Design Thinking process, the third phase: Ideation. You start by
rephrasing and framing your POV as several questions by adding “How might we” at the
beginning of the POV. How Might We questions are the best way to open up Brainstorm
and other Ideation sessions. HMW opens up to Ideation sessions where you explore
ideas that can help you solve your design challenge in an innovative way while making
your users, their needs and your insights about them, your guide.
Why-How Laddering
"As a general rule, asking 'why’ yields more abstract statements and asking 'how’ yields
specific statements. Often times abstract statements are more meaningful but not as
directly actionable, and the opposite is true of more specific statements."
– d.school, Method Card, Why-How Laddering
For this reason, during the Define stage, designers seek to define the problem, and will
generally ask why?Designers will use why to progress to the top of the so-called WhyHow Ladder where the ultimate aim is to find out how you can solve one or more
problems. Your How Might We questions will help you move from the Define stage and
into the next stage in Design Thinking, the Ideation stage, where you start looking for
specific innovative solutions. In other words, you could say that the Why-How Laddering
starts with asking Why to work out How they can solve the specific problem or design
challenge.
The Take Away
In the second phase of the Design Thinking process, there are a variety of methods you
can use to help you and your team define, synthesise, organise, and theme your
research from the Empathise mode, the first phase in the Design Thinking process.
These Define methods will help you tell the right stories, map and understand user
insights and needs, construct personas and immerse them into scenarios and stories.
These Define methods will help you create a comprehensive view of your design
challenge. Once you have an overview of the design challenge, you’re ready to
construct your essential problem statement, also known as the Point Of View. In your
Point Of View, you define your core design challenge, your user’s essential needs and
your insights about them. Your Point of View allows you to open up for How Might We
questions, which will guide your Ideation sessions during which you start to look for
various design solutions to your design challenge.
References & Where to Learn More
Nielsen, Lene, Personas. In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). The
Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Aarhus, Denmark: The
Interaction Design Foundation, 2013:
http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/per...
Nikki Knox, Persona Empathy Mapping, Cooper Journal, 2014:
http://www.cooper.com/journal/2014/05/persona-empa...
Jason Travis, Photographer:
http://www.jasontravisphoto.com/about/
Jason Travis, Persona Project:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasontravis/sets/72157603258446753/with/199450657
8/
Silvana Churruca, Introduction to User Personas, 2013:
http://www.ux-lady.com/introduction-to-user-person...
Silvana Churruca, DIY User Personas, 2013:
http://www.ux-lady.com/diy-user-personas/
Fred Zimny, Adaptive path’s Guide to Experience Mapping, provides an overview for the
creation of customer experience maps, which help visually understand the experiences
and journeys of customs as they interact with brands, 2013:
http://www.slideshare.net/fred.zimny/adaptive-path...
D.school, Empathy Map, Method Card:
http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/themes/dsch...
D.school, Empathy Map, K12 Method Guide:
https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/3d994/Empathy_Map.html
d.school: Why-How Laddering: https://dschool.stanford.edu/wpcontent/themes/dschool/method-cards/why-how-laddering.pdf
Tuzzit, Empathy Map Template:
https://www.tuzzit.com/en/canvas/empathy_map
Tuzzit Tools, Collaborative Whiteboard for Visual Methodologies:
https://www.tuzzit.com
IDEO, HCD Connect, Extract Key Insights Method Guide:
http://www.hcdconnect.org/methods/extract-key-insi...
The Innovation Catalyst Program, Affinity Clustering:
http://www.wearecatalysts.org/toolkit/5
Chris Gielow, Affinity Mapping Time-lapse, 2010:
OPEN IDEO, Design Challenges: https://openideo.com/challenge
d.school, Bootcamp Bootleg, 2011:
http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/201...
Idea.org, Methods, http://www.designkit.org/methods:
http://www.designkit.org/methods
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Jason de Runa. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY
2.0
PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS
1. Question 1
Mapping tools such as Space, Saturate and Group and Affinity Diagrams will help you:
(3 points)
Engage and empathise with your users.
Create an overview by getting all of your information out into the open and organising and
ranking it.
Brainstorm, braindump, and brainwrite in order to come up with the best possible
solutions for your users without wasting time.
Submit your answer
Submit your answer
Affinity Diagrams – Learn How to Cluster and
Bundle Ideas and Facts
Affinity diagrams are a great method to help you make sense of all your information when
you have a lot of mixed data, such as facts, ethnographic research, ideas from brainstorms,
user opinions, user needs, insights, and design issues. Affinity diagrams or clustering exercises
are all about bundling and grouping information, and this method can be one of the most
valuable methods to employ. For this reason, it is used in many phases of Design Thinking, as
well as outside of the design context.
Why?
The Affinity Diagram is a method which can help you gather large amounts of data and
organise them into groups or themes based on their relationships. The affinity process is
great for grouping data gathered during research or ideas generated during Brainstorms.
The method is also called “Space Saturate and Group”. The term “saturate” relates to the
method in which everyone covers or saturates the “space” with images and notes, in order
to create a wall of information, to inform, and start “grouping” the following problemdefining process. You then draw connections between these individual elements to join
the dots and develop new and deeper insights. They will help define the problem(s) and
develop potential ideas for solutions. In other words, you go from analysis to synthesis.
Author/Copyright holder: Josh Evnin. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
Seeing the data coming to life and moving data on post-its around on the wall helps the
design team to immerse themselves in not only their own findings from field work and
research, but sharing and communicating the findings with other team members in order to
get a broader scope of the problem space being investigated.
Best Practice
1. Put pieces of data, small documented facts, drawings, ideas, and observations onto
post-it notes, cards, or pieces of paper and put them up on wall charts, white boards
or chalk boards. This is where the associated imagery of walls filled with post-it
notes comes from. The sticky notes allow the design team to easily stick up and
move pieces of data around in order to create clusters of similar themes, groups and
patterns.
2. Take one post-it and make it the first post-it in the first group.
3. Take the next post-it and ask, “Is this similar to the first one or is it different?”. Then,
you will place it in the first group or into its own group.
4. You continue post-it by post-it as you place similar ideas together and create new
groups when ideas do not fit into an existing cluster.
5. You should now have 3-10 groups, so it’s time to talk about the best elements of
those clusters.
6. Name the clusters to help you create an information structure and discover themes.
7. Rank the most important clusters over less important clusters. Be aware which
values, motives, and priorities you use as foundation ideas before you start ranking:
Is this your user’s priorities, your company’s, the market’s, the stakeholder’s, or
your own? Which ones should you put most emphasis on?
8. Sometimes it make sense to create connections with other clusters using lines or
other devices between individual bits of data or clusters of data.
9. Describe what you have synthesised, for example, insights, user needs, pain points,
or look for gaps you haven’t addressed yet.
10. Focus on translating what you’ve organised and understood into practice, rather
than just identifying similar ideas.
You can download and print the Affinity Diagram (i.e. Space Saturate and Group)
template which you and your team can use as a guide.
Author/Copyright holder: Open.Michigan. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
Affinity Diagrams can help you go from complete chaos and no overview of your information
to creating groups of information, which you have named and organised into hierarchies that
make sense.
The Take Away
Affinity Diagrams can help you bundle and cluster large bodies of information, facts,
ethnographic research, ideas from brainstorms, user opinions, user needs, insights, design
issues, etc. This method will help you name, rank and understand relations between groups
of information. For this reason, this method is also known as “Space Saturate and Group” by
d.school. This is a great method which can, if you follow the step-by-step process which
we’ve described, surprisingly and straightforwardly create an overview and synthesise
your findings. It’s important that you remember to sum up the major insights, user needs,
pain points, gaps, etc. Once you’ve done that you can focus on translating what you’ve
organised and understood and put it into practice.
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
References & Where to Learn More
IDEO.org, Bundle Ideas:
http://www.designkit.org/methods/30
Chris Gielow, Affinity Mapping Timelapse: This video by Chris Gielow gives a good sense of
how the process plays itself out:
https://vimeo.com/47189546
AFFINITY CLUSTERING, The Catalyst Program provides the following Affinity Clustering
Video Guide which gives a good overview:
http://www.wearecatalysts.org/toolkit/5
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: star5112. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
Empathy Map – Why and How to Use It
Did you know that users are more likely to choose, buy and use products that meet their needs
as opposed to products that just meet their wants? An Empathy map will help you understand
your user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you are designing
for. There are many techniques you can use to develop this kind of empathy. An Empathy Map
is just one tool that can help you empathise and synthesise your observations from the
research phase, and draw out unexpected insights about your user’s needs.
An Empathy Map allows us to sum up our learning from engagements with people in the
field of design research. The map provides four major areas in which to focus our attention
on, thus providing an overview of a person’s experience. Empathy maps are also great as a
background for the construction of the personas that you would often want to create later.
An Empathy Map consists of four quadrants. The four quadrants reflect four key traits,
which the user demonstrated/possessed during the observation/research stage. The four
quadrants refer to what the user: Said, Did, Thought, and Felt. It’s fairly easy to determine
what the user said and did. However, determining what they thought and felt should be
based on careful observations and analysis as to how they behaved and responded to
certain activities, suggestions, conversations, etc.
Best practice
Step 1: Fill out the Empathy Map
•
•
Lay the four quadrants out on a table, draw them on paper or on a whiteboard.
Review your notes, pictures, audio, and video from your research/fieldwork and fill
out each of the four quadrants while defining and synthesising:
o What did the user SAY? Write down significant quotes and key words that
the user said.
o What did the user DO? Describe which actions and behaviours you noticed or
insert pictures or drawing.
o
o
What did the user THINK? Dig deeper. What do you think that your user
might be thinking? What are their motivations, their goals, their needs, their
desires? What does this tell you about his or her beliefs?
How did the user FEEL? What emotions might your user be feeling? Take
subtle cues like body language and their choice of words and tone of voice
into account.
Step 2: Synthesise NEEDS
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•
•
•
•
•
Synthesise the user’s needs based on your Empathy Map. This will help you to
define your design challenge.
Needs are verbs, i.e. activities and desires. Needs are not nouns, which will instead
lead you to define solutions.
Identify needs directly from the user traits you noted. Identify needs based on
contradictions between two traits, such as a disconnection between what a user
says and what the user does.
Use the American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to help you
understand and define which underlying needs your user has. In 1943, Maslow
published his paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in which he proposed that
human needs form a hierarchy that can be visualised in the shape of a pyramid with
the largest, most fundamental physiological levels of needs at the bottom, and the
need for self-actualization at the top. Maslow suggested that humans must first
fulfill their most basic physiological needs, such as eating and sleeping, before
fulfilling higher-level needs such as safety, love, esteem and finally self-actualisation.
The most basic level of needs must be met before the individual will strongly desire
or focus motivation on the higher level needs. Different levels of motivation can
occur at any time in the human mind, but Maslow focussed on identifying the basic
and strongest types of motivation and the order in which they can be met. When a
lower level of need fulfillment is not in place, it is technically possible to be fulfilled
at a higher level. However, Maslow argues that this is an unstable fulfillment. For
example, if you’re starving, it doesn’t matter if you’re the world’s leading User
Experience designer, because eventually your hunger is going to overwhelm any
satisfaction you get from your professional status. That’s why we naturally seek to
stabilise the lowest level of the hierarchy that is uncertain before we try to retain
higher levels.
Consult all five layers in Maslow’s Pyramid to help you define which needs your user
is primary focusing on fulfilling. Start reflecting on how your product or service can
help fulfill some of those needs.
Write down your user’s needs.
The Hierarchy of Needs
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Step 3: Synthesise INSIGHTS
•
•
•
An “Insight” is your remarkable realization that can help you to solve the current
design challenge you’re facing.
Look to synthesise major insights, especially from contradictions between two user
attributes. It can be found within one quadrant or in two different quadrants. You
can also synthesise insights by asking yourself: “Why?” when you notice strange,
tense, or surprising behaviour.
Write down your insights.
You can download and print the Empathy Map template.
References & Where to Learn More
Needs Before Wants in User Experiences – Maslow and the Hierarchy of
Needs https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/needs-before-wants-in-userexperiences-maslow-and-the-hierarchy-of-needs
Abraham Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation, 1943
Stephen Bradley’s original piece for Smashing Magazine may be found
here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/04/designing-...
You can read Maslow’s original paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” online
here: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.ht...
An interesting look at how fairground rides can meet the UX hierarchy of needs
- http://entertainmentdesigner.com/news/theme-park-design-news/how-new-rides-arefulfilling-ux-hierarchy/
d.school, Bootcamp Bootleg, 2010:
http://dschool.stanford.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2011/03/BootcampBootleg2010v2SLIM.pdf
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation.
Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Personas – Why and How You Should Use Them
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to
represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a
similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences,
behaviours and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to
recognise that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you
to identify with the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand less
complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of
creating a good user experience for your target user group.
As opposed to designing products, services, and solutions based upon the preferences of
the design team, it has become standard practice within many human centred design
disciplines to collate research and personify certain trends and patterns in the data as
personas. Hence, personas do not describe real people, but you compose your personas
based on real data collected from multiple individuals. Personas add the human touch to
what would largely remain cold facts in your research. When you create persona profiles of
typical or atypical (extreme) users, it will help you to understand patterns in your research,
which synthesises the types of people you seek to design for. Personas are also known as
model characters or composite characters.
Personas provide meaningful archetypes which you can use to assess your design
development against. Constructing personas will help you ask the right questions and
answer those questions in line with the users you are designing for. For example, “How
would Peter, Joe, and Jessica experience, react, and behave in relation to feature X or
change Y within the given context?” and “What do Peter, Joe, and Jessica think, feel, do and
say?” and “What are their underlying needs we are trying to fulfill?”
Personas in Design Thinking
In the Design Thinking process, designers will often start creating personas during the
second phase, the Define phase. In the Define phase, Design Thinkers synthesise their
research and findings from the very first phase, the Empathise phase. Using personas is just
one method, among others, that can help designers move on to the third phase, the Ideation
phase. The personas will be used as a guide for ideation sessions such as Brainstorm, Worst
Possible Idea and SCAMPER.
Four Different Perspectives on Personas
In her Interaction Design Foundation encyclopedia article, Personas, Ph.D and specialist in
personas, Lene Nielsen, describes four perspectives that your personas can take to ensure
that they add the most value to your design project and the fiction-based perspective. Let’s
take a look at each of them:
1. Goal-directed Personas
This persona cuts straight to the nitty-gritty. “It focusses on: What does my typical user
want to do with my product?”. The objective of a goal-directed persona is to examine the
process and workflow that your user would prefer to utilise in order to achieve their
objectives in interacting with your product or service. There is an implicit assumption that
you have already done enough user research to recognise that your product has value to
the user, and that by examining their goals, you can bring their requirements to life. The
goal-directed personas are based upon the perspectives of Alan Cooper, an American
software designer and programmer who is widely recognized as the “Father of Visual
Basic”.
Author/Copyright holder: Smashing Magazine. Copyright terms and licence: All rights reserved. Img Source
2. Role-Based Personas
The role-based perspective is also goal-directed and it also focusses on behaviour. The
personas of the role-based perspectives are massively data-driven and incorporate data
from both qualitative and quantitative sources. The role-based perspective focusses on the
user’s role in the organisation. In some cases, our designs need to reflect upon the part that
our users play in their organisations or wider lives. An examination of the roles that our
users typically play in real life can help inform better product design decisions. Where will
the product be used? What’s this role’s purpose? What business objectives are required of
this role? Who else is impacted by the duties of this role? What functions are served by this
role? Jonathan Grudin, John Pruitt, and Tamara Adlin are advocates for the role-based
perspective.
3. Engaging Personas
“The engaging perspective is rooted in the ability of stories to produce involvement and
insight. Through an understanding of characters and stories, it is possible to create a vivid
and realistic description of fictitious people. The purpose of the engaging perspective is to
move from designers seeing the user as a stereotype with whom they are unable to identify
and whose life they cannot envision, to designers actively involving themselves in the lives
of the personas. The other persona perspectives are criticized for causing a risk of
stereotypical descriptions by not looking at the whole person, but instead focusing only on
behavior.”
– Lene Nielsen
Engaging personas can incorporate both goal and role-directed personas, as well as the
more traditional rounded personas. These engaging personas are designed so that the
designers who use them can become more engaged with them. The idea is to create a 3D
rendering of a user through the use of personas. The more people engage with the persona
and see them as ’real’, the more likely they will be to consider them during the process
design and want to serve them with the best product. These personas examine
the emotions of the user, their psychology, backgrounds and make them relevant to the
task in hand. The perspective emphasises how stories can engage and bring the personas
to life. One of the advocates for this perspective is Lene Nielsen.
One of the main difficulties of the persona method is getting participants to use it (Browne,
2011). In a short while, we’ll let you in on Lene Nielsen’s model, which sets out to cover this
problem though a 10-step process of creating an engaging persona.
Author/Copyright holder: Terri Phillips. Copyright terms and licence: All rights reserved. Img Source
4. Fictional Personas
The fictional persona does not emerge from user research (unlike the other personas) but
it emerges from the experience of the UX design team. It requires the team to make
assumptions based upon past interactions with the user base, and products to deliver a
picture of what, perhaps, typical users look like. There’s no doubt that these personas can
be deeply flawed (and there are endless debates on just how flawed). You may be able to
use them as an initial sketch of user needs. They allow for early involvement with your
users in the UX design process, but they should not, of course, be trusted as a guide for your
development of products or services.
10 steps to Creating Your Engaging Personas and Scenarios
As described above, engaging personas can incorporate both goal and role-directed
personas, as well as the more traditional rounded personas. Engaging personas emphasise
how stories can engage and bring the personas to life. This 10-step process covers the
entire process from preliminary data collection, through active use, to continued
development of personas. There are four main parts:
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Data collection and analysis of data (steps 1, 2),
Persona descriptions (steps 4, 5),
Scenarios for problem analysis and idea development (steps 6, 9),
Acceptance from the organisation and involvement of the design team (steps 3, 7,
8, 10).
The 10 steps are an ideal process but sometimes it is not possible to include all the steps in
the project. Here we outline the 10-step process as described by Lene Nielsen in her
Interaction Design Foundation encyclopedia article, Personas.
1. Collect data. Collect as much knowledge about the users as possible. Perform high-quality
user research of actual users in your target user group. In Design Thinking, the research
phase is the first phase, also known as the Empathise phase.
2. Form a hypothesis. Based upon your initial research, you will form a general idea of the
various users within the focus area of the project, including the ways users differ from one
another – For instance, you can use Affinity Diagrams and Empathy Maps.
3. Everyone accepts the hypothesis. The goal is to support or reject the first hypothesis about
the differences between the users. You can do this by confronting project participants with
the hypothesis and comparing it to existing knowledge.
4. Establish a number. You will decide upon the final number of personas, which it makes
sense to create. Most often, you would want to create more than one persona for each
product or service, but you should always choose just one persona as your primary focus.
5. Describe the personas. The purpose of working with personas is to be able to develop
solutions, products and services based upon the needs and goals of your users. Be sure to
describe personas in a such way so as to express enough understanding and empathy to
understand the users.
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You should include details about the user’s education, lifestyle, interests, values,
goals, needs, limitations, desires, attitudes, and patterns of behaviour.
Add a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character.
Give each of your personas a name.
Create 1–2-pages of descriptions for each persona.
6. Prepare situations or scenarios for your personas. This engaging persona method is
directed at creating scenarios that describe solutions. For this purpose, you should describe
a number of specific situations that could trigger use of the product or service you are
designing. In other words, situations are the basis of a scenario. You can give each of your
personas life by creating scenarios that feature them in the role of a user. Scenarios usually
start by placing the persona in a specific context with a problem they want to or have to
solve.
7. Obtain acceptance from the organisation. It is a common thread throughout all 10 steps
that the goal of the method is to involve the project participants. As such, as many team
members as possible should participate in the development of the personas, and it is
important to obtain the acceptance and recognition of the participants of the various steps.
In order to achieve this, you can choose between two strategies: You can ask the
participants for their opinion, or you can let them participate actively in the process.
8. Disseminate knowledge. In order for the participants to use the method, the persona
descriptions should be disseminated to all. It is important to decide early on how you want
to disseminate this knowledge to those who have not participated directly in the process,
to future new employees, and to possible external partners. The dissemination of
knowledge also includes how the project participants will be given access to the underlying
data.
9. Everyone prepares scenarios. Personas have no value in themselves, until the persona
becomes part of a scenario – the story about how the persona uses a future product – it
does not have real value.
10. Make ongoing adjustments. The last step is the future life of the persona descriptions.
You should revise the descriptions on a regular basis. New information and new aspects
may affect the descriptions. Sometimes you would need to rewrite the existing persona
descriptions, add new personas, or eliminate outdated personas.
Author/Copyright holder: Lene Nielsen. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright
terms.
Lene Nielsen’s poster covers the 10step process to creating engaging personas which
participants are the most likely to find relevant and useful in their design process and as a
base for their ideation processes.
You can download and print the “Engaging Persona” template which you and your team can
use as a guide.
Example of How to Make a Persona Description – Step 5
Author/Copyright holder: phot0geek. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
We will let you in on the details about our persona’s education, lifestyle, interests, values,
goals, needs, limitations, desires, attitudes, and patterns of behaviour. We’ve added a few
fictional personal details to make our persona a realistic character and given her a name.
Hard Facts
Christie is living in a small apartment in Toronto, Canada. She’s 23 years old, single, studies
ethnography, and works as a waiter during her free time.
Interests and Values
Christie loves to travel and experience other cultures. She recently spent her summer
holiday working as a volunteer in Rwanda.
She loves to read books at home at night as opposed to going out to bars. She does like to
hang out with a small group of friends at home or at quiet coffee shops. She doesn’t care too
much about looks and fashion. What matters to her is values and motivations.
In an average day, she tends to drink many cups of tea, and she usually cooks her own
healthy dishes. She prefers organic food, however, she’s not always able to afford it.
Computer, Internet and TV Use
Christie owns a MacBook Air, an iPad and an iPhone. She uses the internet for her studies to
conduct the majority of her preliminary research and studies user reviews to help her
decide upon which books to read and buy. Christie also streams all of her music and she
watches movies online since she does not want to own a TV. She thinks TV’s are outdated
and she does not want to waste her time watching TV shows, entertainment,
documentaries, or news which she has not chosen and finds 100 % interesting herself.
A Typical Day
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Christie gets up at 7 am. She eats breakfast at home and leaves for university at 8.15
every morning.
Depending on her schedule, she studies by herself or attends a class. She has 15
hours of classes at Masters level every week, and she studies for 20 hours on her
own.
She eats her lunch with a study friend or a small group.
She continues to study.
She leaves for home at 3pm. Sometimes she continue to study 2-3 hours at home.
Three nights a week she works as a waitress at a small eco-restaurant from 6pm to
10pm.
Future Goals
Christie dreams of a future where she can combine work and travel. She wants to work in a
third world country helping others who have not had the same luck of being born into a
wealthy society. She’s not sure about having kids and a husband. At least it’s not on her
radar just yet.
Know Your History
The method of developing personas stems from IT system development during the late
1990s where researchers had begun reflecting on how you could best communicate an
understanding of the users. Various concepts emerged, such as user archetypes, user
models, lifestyle snapshots, and model users. In 1999, Alan Cooper published his successful
book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, where he, as the first person ever, described
personas as a method we can use to describe fictitious users. There are a vast number of
articles and books about personas, however a unified understanding of one single way to
apply the method doesn’t exist, nor does a definition of what a persona description should
contain exactly.
The Take Away
Personas are fictional characters. You create personas based on your research to help you
understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. Creating personas will
help you identify with and understand the user you’re designing for. Personas make the
design task at hand less complex, they will guide your ideation processes, and they will
help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.
Engaging personas emphasise how stories can engage and bring the personas to life. The
10-step process covers the entire process from the preliminary data collection, through
active use, to continued development of personas.
References & Where to Learn More
Nielsen, Lene, Personas. In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). The Encyclopedia
of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design
Foundation, 2013:
http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/personas.html
Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, 1999
Silvana Churruca, Introduction to User Persona, June 27, 2013:
http://www.ux-lady.com/introduction-to-user-personas/
Silvana Churruca, DIY User Personas, June 28, 2013:
http://www.ux-lady.com/diy-user-personas/
Personas can be used in conjunction with empathy mapping to provide a snapshot of a
Persona’s experience as described in a Persona Empathy Mapping article by Nikki Knox on
the Cooper.comDesign & Strategy Agency’s Journal.
Atlanta based Photographer Jason Travis has created a series of Persona Portraits with
their artifacts which illustrates the power of visually representing archetypal users,
customers or personalities.
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation.
Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Define and Frame Your Design Challenge by
Creating Your Point Of View and Ask “How Might
We”
Defining your design challenge is probably one of the most important steps in the Design
Thinking process, as it sets the tone and guides all of the activities that follow. In the Define
mode, you should end up creating an actionable problem statement which is commonly
known as the Point of View (POV) in Designing Thinking. You should always base your Point
Of View on a deeper understanding of your specific users, their needs and your most essential
insights about them. In the Design Thinking process, you will gain those insights from your
research and fieldwork in the Empathise mode. Your POV should never contain any specific
solution, nor should it contain any indication as to how to fulfill your users’ needs in the
service, experience, or product you’re designing. Instead, your POV should provide a wide
enough scope for you and your team to start thinking about solutions which go beyond status
quo. Here, you’ll also learn to frame and open up your Point Of View, which is the axis that
Design Thinking revolves around – a challenge well-framed is half solved.
"Your point of view should be a guiding statement that focusses on specific users, and
insights and needs that you uncovered during the empathize mode.
More than simply defining the problem to work on, your point of view is your unique
design vision that you crafted based on your discoveries during your empathy work.
Understanding the meaningful challenge to address and the insights that you can leverage
in your design work is fundamental to creating a successful solution.”
– d.school, Bootcamp Bootleg
Your POV is Your Guide
Your Point of View (POV) defines the RIGHT challenge to address in the following mode in
the Design Thinking process, which is the Ideation mode. A good POV will allow you to
ideate and solve your design challenge in a goal-oriented manner in which you keep a focus
on your users, their needs and your insights about them.
You should construct a narrowly-focussed problem statement or POV as this will generate
a greater quantity and higher quality solutions when you and your team start generating
ideas during later Brainstorm, Brainwriting, SCAMPER and other ideation sessions. In the
ideation process, POV will be your guiding statement that focusses on insights and needs of
a particular user, or composite character. It’s easy to get lost in the ideations sessions if you
don’t have a meaningful and actionable problem statement to help keep your focus on the
core essence of your research results from your previous work. A great POV keeps you on
track. It helps you design for your users and their needs. If you neglect to define your POV,
you may end up getting lost in the ideation processes and in your prototyping process. It’s
all too easy to end up focussing on you and your company’s own needs, trying to fulfill your
and your company’s own dreams, not to mention the risk of getting lost in creating amazing
buttons in the beautiful colours. It’s time to find out how you define your POV.
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
How do you Define your Point Of View?
Step 1
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Define the type of person you are designing for – your user. For example, you could
define the user by developing one or more personas, by using affinity diagrams,
empathy maps, personas and other methods, which help you to understand and
crystallise your research results – observations, interviews, fieldwork, etc.
Select the most essential needs, which are the most important to fulfill. Again,
extract and synthesise the needs you’ve found in your observations, research,
fieldwork, and interviews. Remember that needs should be verbs.
Work to express the insights developed through the synthesis of your gathered
information. The insight should typically not be a reason for the need, but rather a
synthesised statement that you can leverage in your designing solution.
Step 2
Write your definitions into a Point Of View template like this one:
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Your Point Of View template:
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Step 3 – POV Madlib
You can articulate a POV by combining these three elements – user, need, and insight – as
an actionable problem statement that will drive the rest of your design work. It’s
surprisingly easy when you insert your findings in the POV Madlib below. You can
articulate your POV by inserting your information about your user, the needs and your
insights in the following sentence:
[User . . . (descriptive)] needs [Need . . . (verb)] because [Insight . . . (compelling)]
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Condense your Point Of View by using this POV Madlib.
Example: An adult person who lives in the city… needs access to a shared car 1-4 times for
10-60 minutes per week … because he would rather share a car with more people as this is
cheaper, more environmental friendly, however it should still be easy for more people to
share.
Author/Copyright holder: Sam Churchill. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
You articulate a POV by combining these three elements – user, need, and insight – as an
actionable problem statement that will drive the rest of your design work. An example could
be: “A person who lives in the city… needs access to a shared car 1-4 times for 10-60 minutes
per week … he would rather share a car with more people as this is cheaper, more
environmental friendly, and it should still be easy for more people to share.” Here you see one
of Google’s driverless cars – a driverless electric car could be a part of the solution to this
design challenge. However, at this stage of the design process, we’re not ready to look for
solutions just yet.
Step 4 – Make Sure That Your Point Of View is One That:
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Provides a narrow focus.
Frames the problem as a problem statement.
Inspires your team.
Guides your innovation efforts.
Informs criteria for evaluating competing ideas.
Is sexy and captures people’s attention.
Is valid, insightful, actionable, unique, narrow, meaningful, and exciting.
Yay! You’re now well-equipped to create a POV and it’s time understand how to
start using your POV which crystallises all of your previous work in the Empathise mode.
You can download and print the Point Of View template.
“How Might We” Questions Frame and Open Up Your Design
Challenge
You start using your POV by reframing the POV into a question: Instead of saying, we need
to design X or Y, Design Thinking explores new ideas and solutions to a specific design
challenge. It’s time to start using the Design Thinking Method where you ask, “How Might
We…?”
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
When you’ve defined your design challenge in a POV, you can start opening up for ideas to
solve your design challenge. You can start using your POV by asking a specific question
starting with, “How-Might-We?” or “in-what-ways-might-we?”. For example: How might
we… design a driverless car, which is environmental friendly, cheap and easy for more
people to share?
How Might We (HMW) questions are the best way to open up Brainstorm and other
Ideation sessions. HMW opens up to Ideation sessions where you explore ideas that can
help you solve your design challenge. By framing your challenge as a How Might We
question, you’ll prepare yourself for an innovative solution in the third Design Thinking
phase, the Ideation phase. The How Might We method is constructed in such a way that it
opens the field for new ideas, admits that we do not currently know the answer, and
encourages a collaborative approach to solving it.
For example, if your POV is:
“Teenage girls need… to eat nutritious food… in order to thrive and grow in a healthy way.“
The HMW question may go as follows:
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How Might We make healthy eating appealing to young females?
How Might We inspire teenage girls towards healthier eating options?
How Might We make healthy eating something, which teenage girls aspire towards?
How Might We make nutritious food more affordable?
These are simple examples, all with their own subtle nuances that may influence slightly
different approaches in the ideation phases. Your HMW questions will ensure that your
upcoming creative ideation and design activities are informed with one of more HMW
questions, which spark your imagination and aligns well with the core insights and user
needs that you’ve uncovered.
“We use the How Might We format because it suggests that a solution is possible and
because they offer you the chance to answer them in a variety of ways. A properly framed
How Might We doesn’t suggest a particular solution, but gives you the perfect frame for
innovative thinking.”
– Ideo.org
How Might We?
The How Might We question purposely maintains a level of ambiguity, and opens up the
exploration space to a range of possibilities. It's a re-wording of the core need, which you
have uncovered through a deeper interrogation of the problem in your research phase, the
Empathise mode in Design Thinking – and synthesised in the Define mode in Design
Thinking.
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"How" suggests that we do not yet have the answer. “How” helps us set aside
prescriptive briefs. “How” helps us explore a variety of endeavours instead of
merely executing on what we “think” the solution should be.
"Might" emphasises that our responses may only be possible solutions, not
the only solution. “Might” also allows for exploration of multiple possible solutions,
not settling for the first that comes to mind.
"We" immediately brings in the element of a collaborative effort. “We” suggests that
the idea for the solution lies in our collective teamwork.
Without a statement of a clear vision or goal, “How Might We” is obviously meaningless.
The words require a well-framed objective, a POV, which is neither too narrow so as to
make it overly restrictive, nor too broad so as to leave you wandering forever in infinite
possibilities.
An Inspiring HMW example
David and Tom Kelley's book Creative Confidence has the story of the Embrace Warmer, a
design challenge undertaken by Stanford Graduate Students aimed at solving the problem
of neonatal hypothermia, which costs the lives of thousands of infants in developing
countries every year. Faced with the situation where hospital incubators were too
expensive as well as physically inaccessible to villagers who lived in rural settings, a team
of students engaged in some Empathy research, which led them to formulate the HMW
statement:
"How Might We create a baby warming device that helps parents in remote villages give
their dying infants a chance to survive?"
This HMW question inspired the design of the Embrace Warmer sleeping bag device, which
provides the warmth premature babies in rural villages need, and which they are able to
access at a fraction of the cost of traditional hospital incubators.
Whilst a traditional approach may have resulted in technological attempts to reduce the
cost of the incubator, empathic research revealed that one of the core issues was the
inability or unwillingness of mothers to leave their villages or leave their babies at
hospitals for extended periods. This resulted in the reframing of an incubator to a warming
device.
Author/Copyright holder: Embrace Innovations. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use.
Expand on Your How Might We Questions
Marty Neumeier's Second Rule of Genius is all about framing and opening up your Point Of
View by helping us dream of wishing for what we want. To start wishing, ask yourself the
kinds of questions that begin with:
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How might we...? (This is the commonly structured framing phrase used to express
the essence of the challenge at hand.)
In What Ways Might We…. (Expand on HMW to add the possibility of multiple
ways.)
What's stopping us from...?
In what ways could we...?
What would happen if...?
From there, you can ask follow-up questions such as:
Why would we...?
What has changed to allow us to...?
Who would need to...?
When should we...?
“When you let your mind wander across the blank page of possibilities, all constraints and
preconceptions disappear, leaving only the trace of a barely glimpsed dream, the merest
hint of a sketch of an idea.”
– Marty Neumeier's Second Rule of Genius
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Best Practice Guide to Asking How Might We
1. Begin with your Point of View (POV) or problem statement. Start by rephrasing and
framing your Point Of View as several questions by adding “How might we” at the
beginning.
2. Break that larger POV challenge up into smaller actionable and meaningful
questions. Five to ten How Might We questions for one POV is a good starting point.
3. It is often helpful to brainstorm the HMW questions before the solutions brainstorm.
4. Look at your How Might We questions and ask yourself if they allow for a variety of
solutions. If they don’t, broaden them. Your How Might We questions should
generate a number of possible answers and will become a launch pad for your
Ideation Sessions, such as Brainstorms.
5. If your How Might We questions are too broad, narrow them down. You should aim
for a narrow enough frame to let you know where to start your Brainstorm, but at
the same time you should also aim for enough breadth to give you room to explore
wild ideas.
You can download and print out our How Might We template which you and your team can
use as a guide.
A Good POV will Make Your Problem Statement HumanCentred
Creating your POV will help you to define the problem as a problem statement in a humancentred manner. A human-centred problem statement is important in a Design Thinking
project because it guides you and your team, and focusses on the uncovered specific needs.
It also creates a sense of possibility and optimism in that it encourages team members to
generate ideas during the Ideation stage, the third and next stage in the Design Thinking
process. A good problem statement should thus have the following traits. It should be:
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Human-centred. This means you frame your problem statement according to
specific users, their needs and the insights that your team has gained during the
Empathise phase. Rather than focus on technology, monetary returns or product
specifications, the problem statement should be about the people the team is trying
to help.
Broad enough for creative freedom. This means the problem statement should
not focus too narrowly on a specific method regarding the implementation of the
solution. Neither should the problem statement list technical requirements, as these
would unnecessarily restrict the team and prevent them from exploring areas that
might bring unexpected value and insight to the project.
Narrow enough to make it manageable. On the other hand, a problem statement
such as “Improve the human condition” is too broad and will likely cause team
members to feel easily daunted. Problem statements should have sufficient
constraints to make them manageable.
Linear Problem Solving vs. the Non-Linear Nature of Design
Thinking
This design challenge framing is in stark contrast to the business models for linear problem
solving, which rationally attempt to define everything upfront, and then etch away at
achieving the set solution systematically. Design Thinking is also very systematic, but its
approach is more about uncovering the problem rather than etching away at a set solution.
Idris Mootee mentions in her book, Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation, that more than
80% of management tools, systems, and techniques are for value capture, but that the role
of Design Thinking is for value creation.
Well-framed Challenges
A well-framed challenge has just enough constraints, with space to explore. You might have
encountered the following linear problem-solving approach by your manager telling you:
"Design a poster which increases sign-ups to our next event."—or—"Redesign the
packaging so our product is more noticeable on the shelf." These kinds of briefs quite often
attempt to solve the problem of target markets not responding well enough to what's on
offer, and are attempts to put a patch on things. Design Thinking digs deeper and helps us
understand the users, their needs and our insights about them before we decide upon
which course of action to take. As such, Design Thinking will instead help us ask and
research: “Why are people not signing up for the event?” and “What is it about our product
that causes people to ignore it?”
Design Thinking helps us focus on what kind of users we’re dealing with, their needs we're
trying to address in our design challenge, and then understand whether we're actually
addressing those needs well enough.
Define and re-define – The Non-Linear Nature of Design
Thinking
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
The five stages of Design Thinking are not sequential steps, but different “modes” you can put
yourself in, to iterate on your problem definition, ideas, or prototype, or to learn more about
your users at any point during the project. It is important to be aware from the outset that the
initial definition of your challenge is based upon your initial set of constraints or
understandings, and that you should revisit and re-frame your definition often as you uncover
new insights indicating a problem in the framing as you work in the other four Design
Thinking modes.
Know Your History
One of the most commonly structured framing phrases which we use to express the
essence of the challenge at hand is: How Might We? (HMW). The Phrase is rumoured to
have been popularized by Min Basadur at Proctor and Gamble, then on to IDEO, next at
Google and later at Facebook in a viral breakout, that has since revolutionised how
companies frame their innovation challenges. GK Van Platter of Humantific references a
much earlier example in an article entitled, Origins of How Might We? (2012). The
reframing technique has its roots all the way back in the mid-sixties, with a work by Sidney
J. Parnes Ph.D "Creative Behavior Guidebook", which touches on the concept of "Invitation
Stems" or "How Mights" .
The Take Away
Spend enough time to carefully consider the format and composition of your POV and
HMW questions to ensure that your upcoming creative ideation and design activities are
informed with one of more HMW questions, which spark your imagination and align well
with the core insights and user needs that you’ve uncovered. Creating you POV helps you
define your problem statement in a human-centred manner.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5
minutes thinking about solutions.”
– Albert Einstein
References & Where to Learn More
Idris Mootee, Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation: What They Can't Teach You at
Business or Design School, 2013
Ideo.org, How Might We, http://www.designkit.org/methods/3
Marty Neumeier, The Rules of Genius #2, Wish for what you want, 2014:
http://www.liquidagency.com/brand-exchange/rule-2-wish-want/
Sarah Soule: How Design Thinking Can Help Social Entrepreneurs, 2013:
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/sarah-soule-how-design-thinking-can-help-socialentrepreneurs
Warren Berger, The Secret Phrase Top Innovators Use, 2012:
https://hbr.org/2012/09/the-secret-phrase-top-innovato
GK VanPatter, Origins of How Might We?, 2012:
http://www.humantific.com/origins-of-how-might-we/
D.school groups The k12 Lab Wiki, Point of View Statements,
2009: https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/41a18/POV_.html
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Simon Powell. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY
2.0
PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS
1. Question 1
Define a Point Of View using a Point Of View Madlib
Create a real or hypothetical (but realistic) Point Of View by combining these three
elements – user, need, and insight – as an actionable problem statement that could drive
your design thinking work. Inserting your real or hypothetical information about your user,
user needs and insights in the following sentence:
[User . . . (descriptive)] needs to [need . . . (verb)] because [insight . . . (compelling)]
You should, of course, come up with your own Point Of View, but here’s an example answer
for your inspiration:
A person who lives in the city… needs access to a shared car 1-4 times for 10-60 minutes per
week … he would rather share a car with more people as this is cheaper, more environmental
friendly, and it should still be easy for more people to share.
Map the Stakeholders
Having faced the problem statement and defined the challenge space, the challenge owner or
initiator now needs to gather the troops. In more complex settings or larger organisations,
drafting a stakeholder map, outlining people involved, affected, or influenced both internally
and externally is a necessary first step.
If you’re a project owner or initiator, one of your tasks will be to understand, manage, and
bring together various parties affected by your intended endeavour, both internally and
externally. One of the very first steps is to form a team, which in many cases will only be
possible after surveying the list of the influenced and the influencers.
For this, you'll need some kind of plan. One such plan leveraged by many organisations is
the stakeholder map. This could start out small and grow as your scope of research and
investigation expands and you gain a clearer idea of the challenge territory. Your new team
may join you in this endeavour. A whiteboard or wall chart with post-it notes could be
enough to start getting the people scoped out quickly.
Stakeholder Mapping
Stakeholders are those people, groups, or individuals who either have the power to affect,
or are affected by the endeavour you're engaged with. They range from the head of your
organisation to the man on the street who may experience the effects of what you set out to
do. Stakeholders are affected and can affect your endeavours to varying degrees, and the
degrees should be considered when analysing and mapping out the stakeholder landscape.
Mindtools.com provides some helpful guides on how to go about analysing whom your
stakeholdersare and what their influence may be. Their suggested approach is to plot on a
graph their "Power of Influence" and their "Level of Interest" to give you an idea of how to
manage the range of stakeholder needs.
Mapping the internal players and their levels of involvement, buy-in to the process and
knowledge of, or experience with Design Thinking will allow the challenge owner to make
some key decisions about who to include and when. It may also provide some insight as to
who may need to be consulted, convinced, or asked for permission about using a Design
Thinking approach.
Mapping external parties affected will provide a plan that can help you decide who to
approach in the upcoming research phases that focus on empathy and human needs. For
example, within a service design project, understanding the customer base, segmentation,
and need variations may provide a good platform for setting up the various focus groups,
observation plans, and other ethnographic methods that may be applied to gain customer
insight.
Create a list of all those internally on the challenge owners' side of things: people within
the company, organisation, or group attempting to tackle the challenge. The list should
include anyone who will be affected in any way, directly or indirectly, and who will need to
make a decision or act on the project in some way.
Give each person a rank in terms of importance and interest level; you can use your own
scale of importance, depending on the number of people being assessed.
Gathering the listed stakeholders in groups, plot them onto the map in relation to their
influence and interest. The pictures formed by both the internal and external stakeholder
maps will give you a good indication of the type of team you may need to assemble to
handle the Design Thinking challenge ahead.
Evaluating stakeholder influence and interest
Mindtools also provides a list of questions or considerations on these stakeholders, which
are summarised below:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work?
What motivates them most of all?
What information do they want from you?
What is the best way of communicating your message to them?
What is their current opinion of your work?
Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you?
If they are not likely to be positive, what will win their support?
If you don't think you will be able to win them around, how will you manage their
opposition?
Who else might be influenced by their opinions?
These questions will assist in further making sense of the map and understanding who to
include in your team, and who the team may interface with going forward, both externally
and internally. It also provides you with a good idea of which people will be most important
to empathise with in the coming phases, where you will be exploring the human needs and
experiences in your challenge space. The Mindtools stakeholder guide also provides a
stakeholder mapping template to use in this process of making sense of who has an impact
or is impacted by your challenge space.
The "DIYtoolkit People and Connections Map" inspired by Namahn and Yellow Window
Service Design: Design Flanders (2012) Stakeholder Mapping provides an alternative visual
method of mapping the spheres of influence and influenced across the spectrum of
stakeholders.
An even deeper level of exploration is Cultural Mapping, an inquiry method developed by
David Gray, an innovation and organisational change consultant; author of Gamestorming.
Cultural Mapping may be suitable, for instance, where the very core of an organisation's
purpose and values are being evaluated or redefined.
The Take Away
Stakeholders are those people, groups, or individuals who have either the power to affect,
or are affected by the endeavour you're engaged with. They range from the head of your
organisation to the man on the street who may experience the effects of what you set out to
do. Stakeholders are affected and can affect your endeavours to varying degrees and the
degrees should be considered when analysing and mapping out the stakeholder landscape.
References and Where to Learn More
MindTools.com. Stakeholder
Analysis. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_07.htm
DIY Tool Kit, People Connections Map Template and
Guide. http://diytoolkit.org/tools/people-connections-map/
ServiceDesignToolkit.org, Namahn and Yellow Window Service Design, Design Flanders
(2012) Stakeholder Mapping Work Poster. http://servicedesigntoolkit.org/downloads2011.html
Dave Gray,May 06, 2014, Culture mapping: Space and
place. http://www.slideshare.net/dgray_xplane/culture-mapping-space-and-place
Hero image: Author/Copyright holder: Kennisland. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA
2.0
Map the Stakeholders
Having faced the problem statement and defined the challenge space, the challenge owner or
initiator now needs to gather the troops. In more complex settings or larger organisations,
drafting a stakeholder map, outlining people involved, affected, or influenced both internally
and externally is a necessary first step.
If you’re a project owner or initiator, one of your tasks will be to understand, manage, and
bring together various parties affected by your intended endeavour, both internally and
externally. One of the very first steps is to form a team, which in many cases will only be
possible after surveying the list of the influenced and the influencers.
For this, you'll need some kind of plan. One such plan leveraged by many organisations is
the stakeholder map. This could start out small and grow as your scope of research and
investigation expands and you gain a clearer idea of the challenge territory. Your new team
may join you in this endeavour. A whiteboard or wall chart with post-it notes could be
enough to start getting the people scoped out quickly.
Stakeholder Mapping
Stakeholders are those people, groups, or individuals who either have the power to affect,
or are affected by the endeavour you're engaged with. They range from the head of your
organisation to the man on the street who may experience the effects of what you set out to
do. Stakeholders are affected and can affect your endeavours to varying degrees, and the
degrees should be considered when analysing and mapping out the stakeholder landscape.
Mindtools.com provides some helpful guides on how to go about analysing whom your
stakeholdersare and what their influence may be. Their suggested approach is to plot on a
graph their "Power of Influence" and their "Level of Interest" to give you an idea of how to
manage the range of stakeholder needs.
Mapping the internal players and their levels of involvement, buy-in to the process and
knowledge of, or experience with Design Thinking will allow the challenge owner to make
some key decisions about who to include and when. It may also provide some insight as to
who may need to be consulted, convinced, or asked for permission about using a Design
Thinking approach.
Mapping external parties affected will provide a plan that can help you decide who to
approach in the upcoming research phases that focus on empathy and human needs. For
example, within a service design project, understanding the customer base, segmentation,
and need variations may provide a good platform for setting up the various focus groups,
observation plans, and other ethnographic methods that may be applied to gain customer
insight.
Create a list of all those internally on the challenge owners' side of things: people within
the company, organisation, or group attempting to tackle the challenge. The list should
include anyone who will be affected in any way, directly or indirectly, and who will need to
make a decision or act on the project in some way.
Give each person a rank in terms of importance and interest level; you can use your own
scale of importance, depending on the number of people being assessed.
Gathering the listed stakeholders in groups, plot them onto the map in relation to their
influence and interest. The pictures formed by both the internal and external stakeholder
maps will give you a good indication of the type of team you may need to assemble to
handle the Design Thinking challenge ahead.
Evaluating stakeholder influence and interest
Mindtools also provides a list of questions or considerations on these stakeholders, which
are summarised below:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work?
What motivates them most of all?
What information do they want from you?
What is the best way of communicating your message to them?
What is their current opinion of your work?
Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you?
If they are not likely to be positive, what will win their support?
If you don't think you will be able to win them around, how will you manage their
opposition?
Who else might be influenced by their opinions?
These questions will assist in further making sense of the map and understanding who to
include in your team, and who the team may interface with going forward, both externally
and internally. It also provides you with a good idea of which people will be most important
to empathise with in the coming phases, where you will be exploring the human needs and
experiences in your challenge space. The Mindtools stakeholder guide also provides a
stakeholder mapping template to use in this process of making sense of who has an impact
or is impacted by your challenge space.
The "DIYtoolkit People and Connections Map" inspired by Namahn and Yellow Window
Service Design: Design Flanders (2012) Stakeholder Mapping provides an alternative visual
method of mapping the spheres of influence and influenced across the spectrum of
stakeholders.
An even deeper level of exploration is Cultural Mapping, an inquiry method developed by
David Gray, an innovation and organisational change consultant; author of Gamestorming.
Cultural Mapping may be suitable, for instance, where the very core of an organisation's
purpose and values are being evaluated or redefined.
The Take Away
Stakeholders are those people, groups, or individuals who have either the power to affect,
or are affected by the endeavour you're engaged with. They range from the head of your
organisation to the man on the street who may experience the effects of what you set out to
do. Stakeholders are affected and can affect your endeavours to varying degrees and the
degrees should be considered when analysing and mapping out the stakeholder landscape.
References and Where to Learn More
MindTools.com. Stakeholder
Analysis. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_07.htm
DIY Tool Kit, People Connections Map Template and
Guide. http://diytoolkit.org/tools/people-connections-map/
ServiceDesignToolkit.org, Namahn and Yellow Window Service Design, Design Flanders
(2012) Stakeholder Mapping Work Poster. http://servicedesigntoolkit.org/downloads2011.html
Dave Gray,May 06, 2014, Culture mapping: Space and
place. http://www.slideshare.net/dgray_xplane/culture-mapping-space-and-place
Hero image: Author/Copyright holder: Kennisland. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA
2.0