How Might We Hypothesize?
By: Nia Braccidiferro
Most people want to be right on the first try, so they can be done with whatever they’re doing. But, their first try usually isn’t their best. According to Mindful Marks’ video on the second phase of the Design Thinking process, Define is the crucial part of the process where our team unpacks the data that we acquire during the Empathy phase and synthesize it into problem statements that will help us in the future.
In a past Thoughtbot article entitled, “Writing Effective Problem Statements”, Christian Reuter reminds us that a statement provides clarity and focus for the whole life of the product. Without it, we will be unclear of what we’re building and why we’re building it. In order to create a successful problem statement, we must phrase it as a question, preferably “How might we/What can we do to?” The question must be highly specific, in order to generate more solutions and impose fewer limitations.
And in my opinion, the most important part of the problem statement generation process is making sure it focuses on the humans that we’re providing our service or product for and not our organization. The amount of work we decide to put in during the Empathy phase affects how effective we are during the Define phase. Reuter explains that the preliminary research of observing and engaging can provide an understanding of a particular part of human experience and some of the struggles they face. These observations can be synthesized into a meaningful problem statement, which later can be reviewed collaboratively with our team.
In the IIT (Institute of Design)’s video on “What is Problem Framing in Design”, Jeremy Alexis points out that, in most cases, clients come with their own specific solutions and broad user groups before we even have the opportunity to begin the Design Thinking process. This might not be the best thing for the client because they may have a skewed or inaccurate view of what they think their consumers want. Alexis insists that we depart from focusing on the industry aspect and move to focus on users. This simple step will help shift our mindset from single ideas and symptoms to systems and root causes.
This entire phase is a messy process, as defined by The Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. They say this in their video "Design Thinking: Define" because we never know what path our data will lead us down. After we collect the data, we connect the statements made by the users and find the patterns and themes throughout. This can be anything from relationships, places of work, age, opinions, basically anything.
Based on these findings, we need to create our point of view on a deeper understanding of our specific users, their needs and our essential insights on them, as stated in an article by the Interactive Design Foundation, entitled, “Define and Frame Your Design Challenge by Creating Your Point Of View and Ask “How Might We”. They continue to explain that our point of view should never contain a specific solution, it should provide a wide enough scope for us to start thinking about solutions that go beyond the status quo. But this is never quite that simple.
We could go through months of research and analyzing, just to find out that our original hypothesis for the situation was wrong, just like Frog Design discussed in their video, “Hypothesis Generation”. The Define phase is not a linear process. It may take multiple attempts to finally reach a final problem statement. It will help us in the long run because the deeper we go in, the more we find out to better design our product.