Are You Solving The "Right" Problem?

Design thinking has five non-linear stages: empathize , define, ideate, prototype, and test. If you missed the introduction, you can find these articles to get you started on design thinking, but for this week, we are diving into the define stage.

Article: What is Design Thinking?

Article: Empathy Mapping for Beginners

You can apply the design thinking process to ANY situation where you create something to solve a problem. After the empathize stage, you have hopefully cleared some fog on what problems need solving, but it can still be unclear on the precise way to go. In this article, I'm going to share some strategies on how you can ensure that the problem you're trying to solve is the "right" problem.

Whenever you dedicate time and energy towards a problem, you want to make sure that the problem is meaningful and you're taking action and serving a purpose by solving it (especially if you have a team involved and multiple stakeholders).

So how do you know if you're solving the right problem? This is a critical stage within the design thinking process, and if you don't spend enough time and energy here, you will be wasting a lot of precious time... the good news about this process is that it naturally weeds out the ideas that don't work.

Let me explain this further with an example. Let's say you decide to help a rural school in an area of poverty where attendance is very low and there are nearly no learning tools or supplies (no desks, no books, no chalkboards, etc.). You want to take action and help this community and decide to solve the issue of the lack of educational resources. You go through the rest of the design thinking process of ideate (what books would be best for the community? What do the teachers need to succeed? What do the students need to succeed?)

You decide to test out with one, one-room schoolhouse, where the cost of materials is not overwhelming for your company. You send the supplies and eagerly await to hear feedback from the impact. Are the kids learning? Are they engaged? Are they excited to be there? But there are no kids that are attending, maybe one or two sprinkled throughout the week.

You go back to the empathize and define stage and try to dig further into why you didn't make an impact after supplying the school with resources. You dig further into why the kids are not coming in the first place. After really taking time to define the problem: Kids are not coming to school. It wasn't because there were no learning materials, it was because they were often sick from poor drinking water quality.

Your team then dives into how to get clean water to these kids and the community. After the design thinking process of creating and testing prototypes for access to clean water, kids are then healthy enough to start attending school in the first place.

This was a very rushed example of how you could really dive into a solution to a problem, but it ends up not being the "right" problem, but due to the nature of this process and how it incorporates prototyping and testing, you can identify misalignments well ahead of investing a lot of time and resources.

So let's go over some strategies you can use in the define stage to help you solve the "right" problem and set a strong foundation for the next stage, ideation.

Please keep in mind that this process is not linear, though many diagrams make it look so. Many ideas that come to mind are often generated by either you feeling a pain-point, or you notice a pattern with others that experience a pain-point.

This can trigger you to assume you know a problem to solve, but you still need to jump back and forth between the define and empathize stage before moving on. This is will allow you to validate and continually gain clarity between the people whom you're trying to help and the problem you want to solve.

This "clarity" involves analysis and synthesis. Analysis in this context means organizing and simplifying the data, observations, and information collected during the empathize stage. Synthesizing in this stage involves taking the organized pieces of information after analyzing and putting them together into a coherent idea. Thus, summing up this "define" stage as a way to organize and make sense of all the information you have to develop a clear problem to solve.

You may have learned from other sources that the analysis stage takes place during the empathize stage and synthesize is in the define stage, and that could be true, but I personally interpret the empathize stage as the actual process of collecting information, and then you take that information and analyze it in the define stage. It really doesn't matter, as long as you are analyzing!

There are various ways to create a statement that helps articulate the problem in this define stage. Two that I will cover are Point of View (POV) problem statements and How Might We (HMW) questions. You may even find that creating the POV will lead to a strong HMW.

I love how the Interaction Design Foundation breaks a POV problem statement into 3 main parts, the user, the need, and the insight. So you can define the problem by combining these elements, I'll pull from the example earlier to help visual. The kids (user) need clean water (the need) because they are not healthy enough for school (insight).

The POV approach is relatively easy to create and is very goal oriented. As long as you have the correct information by really diving deep into the empathy stage, creating a POV problem statement is a clear, effective, and easy way to move forward in the design thinking process.

The other statement I will cover are "How might we" questions. These types of questions are encouraged to bridge the gap from the define stage to the ideate stage (where you brainstorm ideas to help solve the problem). If we continue the clean water problem, a HMW question may look like this...

How might we...increase the access to clean water?

Notice how this type of question is open-ended and it encourages ideation and curiosity. When you define a problem, you want to set the team up for success and allow for any and all ideas to be shared. The simple step of posing a problem in the HMW format is an effective way to get your team on a strong foundation for the ideation stage.

Next week I will be writing about the ideation stage. If you are enjoying these instructional design articles, subscribe so you are notified when they come out! Also, if you have any questions on how you can apply design thinking to improve your approach to solving problems, don't hesitate to reach out and send me a message on LinkedIn!