how to understand problems

how to understand problems

1. sendhil

   • question is never solved, but change a few parts can lead to great improvements

2. Herb

   • problem: situation that people don't want; a question depends on specific group of people, a problem from one may not a problem to others.

3. essence of understanding problem

   • Tommy
     • communicating with staceholders

4. solution: meet some people's needs but failing to meet others.

   • come up with a spectrum of needs to design, and decide who're going to optimize for

5. ways of communicate to understand problems

   • surveys
     • overly structured, biased on who responds, and shallow in insight
   • interviews
     • more time and a smaller range of people
       • learn from Terry Gross, avoid leading, loaded, double-negatives question, define a focus.
   • observations
     • need more time than interviews
   • secondary research
     • learning from others communication
   • contextual Inquiry
     • time consuming; need a focus; observe of people life and have them teach you about it

6. define problem

   • interpretation and synthesis
     • way to understand aspects of data: what patterns to describe? what cause the problem? outcome? any aspect can change?
   • knowledges generated from answering
     • goal that people try to achieve
     • personas that we design for
     • scenarios that your design may be used
     • use cases that you design can use for
     • claims analysis can track scenarios back to data
   • argument
     • the last challenge: explain the problem; a good argument like a scenario to envision and test design ideas.