Getting to the ideation process in the double diamond method of design thinking starts to dial up the excitement. By this step, you have had a whole team of different subject matter experts soaking in the details of the user. You all have a clear picture of who you are building for and what problems they are facing.
Now you get to invent things.
Getting a development team in the user’s headspace is half the battle toward good software design. In the double diamond method, we discussed the value of finding out what problem a user is facing before trying to build something. A product without a clear pain point to alleviate will have trouble finding an audience.
Defining a problem statement puts you on the path to building something people will use. As your team continues on the next convergent and divergent paths of the double diamond, you will use this problem statement as the guidepost for your users’ point of view. One of the best ways to help define the problem statement is by building an empathy map.
Writing the right kind of user research questions is the most important part of a user interview. The interview process is one of the first steps in your team’s design plan that yields valuable insights from the people you want to build something for. Getting out of their way and letting them talk is paramount.
The thing to keep in mind when writing the questions for a user interview is to give the interviewee as much space to state their genuine opinion as possible. Many people will be susceptible to questions that guide them toward one answer or another. To truly understand the pain points and motivation for a user — and then building a great product from that information — you have to let them feel like any answer is the right one.
User research methods can give your organization insight into what users need most. If your business doesn’t have a department devoted to user research (most don’t) you may not know what your ideal users are looking for in a specific product or service. This gap in what they want and what exists is where opportunity lives. User research gives you a map for how to get there.
As laid out in our discussion of design thinking, user research is the point in the process where you survey the users about their own experiences by acquiring divergent data about their actions and thoughts. The broad range will give you many ideas you probably aren’t thinking of or solutions you never thought to solve for. The user is king and you must use their insights as a beacon during the process.
Too often, innovators try to build the right thing using this process:
Have an idea → Build it → See if people like it
That’s all great for romanticizing lightning bolts of inspiration, but if you don’t test whether you’re building the right thing until the product exists, it’s kind of too late to get all that time and money back.
While innumerable designers and firms try to build the next revolutionary solution, you can get a leg up by asking a simple question: Is this the right thing to build?
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