How to Understand and design problems

How to Understand and design problems

1. Understanding problems?

   • Problems are simply undesirable situations
     • Mostly solutions aims to improve the situation but problem is never fully solved
       • situations desirable to one group of people can be desirable to the other set of people
         • Recognizing which problems we wish to solve and intention behind is important.
           • Communicating with the target group and understanding their problems is relevant
             • Types of communication
               • Surveys
                 • People are communicated with in an impersonal, structured, asynchronous, and structured manner, providing you with large scale insights, but unintentionally biased.
               • Interviews
                 • Communicating with smaller group of people with in a synchronised, in a more structured way with deeper insights and involves more time
                 • Things to avoid:leading questions, double negative questions, loaded or complex questions
                 • Points to keep in mind : Focus questions around the design goals, brainstorm questions , keep questions open-ended, build rapport with participants
                 • Downside : can be inaccurate based on flawed memories, participants sometimes may change change response with regards to societal pressure termed as participant bias
               • Observations
                 • It reveals the inherent richness and complexity of a person's world, but requires a much greater time commitment than a conversation.
                 • Things to consider: Outline a focus, Build relationship with you and your subject of interest, generate questions as you observe
                 • Cons : Extremely time consume, hard to generalize as can be done only for a project
               • Secondary research
                 • It leverages insights gleaned from communicating with people, and published as research papers, books, and other articles, but does not involve communicating with people directly.

2. How to design problems ?

   • Requires Interpretation and synthesis of huge data collected with respect to problems
     • Goals to reflect :Patterns observed when people were discussing the problem, cause and consequence of the problem and aspects which are chanageable
     • Generates several ideas regarding the problem
       • Goals
         • Identify Main goals from the problem and what problem needs to be solved
       • Personas
         • Identify the target population for whom we are designing
           • Create personas(fictional people for whom we are designing )
       • Design scenarios
         • Defines who, what, when, where, why, how, and how often someone tries to accomplish a goal
       • Combine goals, personas and scenarios to state and articulate a problems
         • A good problem definition is one which has a context, scale , a consequence of the problem
         • A good design process begins with a problem statement which articulates the importance of what we are doing
         • A good argument defines the causality of a problem
           • It helps persuade the stakeholders that problem we are trying to solve is important has an impact
   • After you have collected several data one needs to interpret and design the issues