In order to understand problems, research has to be conducted by interviewing and observing the target audience in its own context. After understanding its needs, problems and expectations associated with the defined challenge the data has to be interpreted. The aim here is to detect patterns among research data and use them to generate actionable insights.
Research Techniques
The shallow product-centric mind-set has to be replaced with a more human-centric one. Therefore, understanding the problem means understanding the customer. Some research techniques help doing so.
Persona Technique: Personas, which are representative imaginary characters, are the best way to define and visualize target user groups. Design thinking teams should limit the number of personas to three to prevent falling into the trap of designing for everybody.
Interview Technique: The aim of interviews is to collect as much data as possible by asking specific and unbiased questions to the representative users.
User Observation Technique: Observation of users in their own contexts, in order to uncover the needs and problems that are not captured during interviews.
Research Skills
Observation: ”Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.” – Swiss painter Paul Klee
Analyzing artworks, especially abstract ones, and trying to understand their content improves how we observe and understand the things around us.
Asking the Right Questions: ”The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.” – Novelist Thomas Berger
Wrong questions can mislead the team. Giving the right answers to the wrong questions is even worse than giving the wrong answers to the right questions.
Asking in the Right Manner: ”By the act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality.” – ”Observer effect” in quantum mechanics
Asking questions in a biased way affects the objectivity of the answers.
Interpretation Techniques
Empathy Mapping Technique: Emotional design requires treating people not as subscribers but as human beings who form emotional bonds to the products, services, or spaces the use.
1. An empathy mapping sheet is hung on the whiteboard for the selected persona.
2. The team analyzes research data about the persona and discusses his feelings about the current situation.
3. Video recordings of the research phase are very helpful at this stage.
4. Team members then fill in each section of the empathy mapping sheet.
5. They repeat these steps for each persona group.
6. Finally, they analyze all of the notes on the empathy maps and generate actionable insights from the most prominent emotional issues.
Affinity Diagram Technique: Popular for grouping large amounts of research data
1. Write each research finding on a separate sticky note
2. Sticky notes are then grouped
3. Category names are assigned to each group
4. Relationships between categories are established
5. Analyze the affinity diagram and explore patterns among the research data
6. Use these patterns to generate actionable insights
Journey Maps Technique: This is an effective technique to visualize and evaluate the end-to-end experience of users during their engagement with a product or service at different touch points. It provides a holistic representation of each persona group’s experience, emotions, motivation, and satisfaction level at each part of the interaction.
Cause and Effect Diagram Technique: ”There are no big problems; there are just a lot of little problems.” – Henry Ford
This functional decomposition approach can be used by dividing problems into smaller parts and then analyzing the root causes behind them.
This can be done by using the ”five whys technique”, which iteratively asks questions and uses the answers as the basis of the next question until the root cause is found for a particular problem.
The ”cause and effect diagram” is a more visual technique
The problem is written on the right side of the diagram.
The main causes of the problem are listed on the left side, under different categories, in a fish bone structure.
Detailed root causes are listed under each associated main category.
Finally, the relationship between the problem and its possible causes are analyzed to generate insights.
Mind-Mapping Technique: Mind-mapping is another popular technique to break down complex problems into smaller parts and use them to drive actionable insights.
Setup a whiteboard, markers, and sticky notes or download a mind mapping tool.
Write the problem as a keyword at the center of the map.
Position it as the main topic/problem.
Separate the main topic into simpler first-level subtopics.
Use visual elements to represent each first-level subtopic.
Connect first-level subtopics to the main topic with tree branches.
Continue to elaborate these topics into second- third- and nth-level subtopics based on more detailed cause and effect relationships.
When the tree diagram is ready, generate insights by analyzing subtopics and their linkage to each other.
Interpretation Skills
”The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” – Peter F. Drucker, Harvard Business School’s strategy and management teacher
Empathy: Empathy is the ability to understand feelings of other people. In design thinking it is important to understand the emotions of target users and interpret their needs, problems, interests, and expectations.
Pattern Recognition: Interpretation is mostly about recognizing patterns among research data.
”Art is pattern informed by sensibility.” – Poet and literary critic Herbert Read
Intuition: Being able to recognize patterns results in a better understanding of the deterministic cause-and-effect relationships among things and thus help predicting what will happen in certain conditions.
