As described, the “why” and the “how” questions can expand or narrow down the framework.
A natural adjustment often takes place in a brainstorming session, especially if various methods are used in brainstorming, such as transforming and combining or even minimizing.
Method
How can we solve our problem?
Minimize
reduce it?
reduce an existing solution?
Maximize
expand it?
expand an existing solution?
Transform
mentally transfer it to another area?
transfer a solution existing in another area to my problem?
Combine
combine it with other problems?
combine several existing solutions?
Modify/adapt
modify it?
modify an existing solution?
Rearrange/invert
change or invert its internal order?
change or invert the order of an existing solution?
Substitute
substitute a partial problem?
substitute a part of an existing solution?
Let’s take the example of a BIC ballpoint pen and the method of leaving out or reducing. For the BIC ballpoint pen, everything that was unnecessary was left out. All that was left in the end were three indispensable, essential parts: the refill, the holder, and a cap that also serves as a clip. An ingenious product that has remained unaltered for more than 50 years.
Is there even any room left for innovation?
The answer is: Yes! Perhaps you have already asked yourself before why the cap of the BIC ballpoint pen has a hole at the tip. The hole was not always there. It was designed to prevent small children from suffocating if they swallow the cap and it gets stuck in their windpipe. Sufficient air can still get through the little hole. This is why BIC pen caps have had holes for more than 24 years.
KEY LEARNINGS
Draw up the problem definition
Question in the form of “Why?” and “How might we?” in order to grasp and understand the problem.
Clarify what type of a problem it is: wicked, ill-defined, or well-defined. Adjust your approach accordingly.
In the case of wicked problems, first find partial solutions for a partial problem. Proceed iteratively.
Understand further partial aspects of the overall problem if it can’t be understood at once, and iteratively add more solution components.
Draw up a structured design brief so that the team and the client have the same understanding of the starting point.
Make use of different possibilities of finding the design challenge (e.g., investigation of the entire customer experience chain or a change of perspective).
Begin with the first iteration even if the ideal starting area has not been found yet. This way, the problem can often be understood better.
1.4 How to discover user needs
Priya has a new innovation project. Rumors have it that the Internet and technology giant where Priya is working will embrace the theme of health for seniors—a theme and a segment about which Priya knows little and which, for her personally, is still pretty remote.
Actually, Priya has little time for taking the needs of seniors into consideration alongside her numerous other projects. Her work environment teems with people in their mid-twenties; hardly anyone has yet crossed the threshold of 50 and can be classed even remotely in this segment. Her friends and acquaintances in Zurich are all between 30 and 40 years old, and her parents are still working full time and don’t feel they belong in the user group of retirees. Her grandparents, whom Priya could ask, have unfortunately passed away.
How can we carry out a needfinding when we actually have no time for it? Or better: How do we explain to the boss that we won’t come to work today?
Priya is aware that the personal contact with potential users—that is, people—is indispensable if you really want to live good design thinking.
Omitting the needfinding is not an option for Priya, because it would mean skipping over an entire phase of the design thinking process. Because the phases of understanding and observing as well as the synthesis (defining the point of view) cannot be strictly separated from one another, ignoring needfinding would mean omitting no fewer than three steps.
All these steps have an important feature in common: the direct contact with the users, the target group of people who will use an innovative product or our service regularly in the future.
It is an illusion to think that we are familiar with the lifestyles of all the people for which we develop innovations day after day. Let’s take a look at all the projects Lilly has gone through over the last four years as a needfinding expert: She would have had to be old, visually impaired, lesbian, a kindergartener, or even an illegal immigrant. Not to mention the project concerning a palliative care ward that inevitably would have catapulted Lilly into her deathbed. That certainly didn’t happen to Lilly. At least not at the time when her task was to innovate everyday life for these people in the final hours of life and the procedures at a palliative care ward.
It is important to reflect on ourselves and realize we don’t represent the people for whom we develop our innovation. If we do, in very exceptional cases, we must proceed with great caution when transferring our needs onto others.
Peter also questions his ideas for improving the quality of his product when he is sitting at his desk, doing nothing. When was the last time he saw somebody using his product in daily life? Has he ever stood next to a customer at the exact moment when the customer felt the need for the now newly invented function? Not because Peter had asked the customer (“Would you like . . .”) but because the customer had searched for this function on his own.
Such moments give us an insight into the lives of users and indicate where deep and long-term needs are hidden.
Not knowing the everyday life of people means we continually make assumptions on which we base our decisions. About eight million people live in Switzerland. If Priya, who lives in Zurich today, claimed she knows exactly how the residents in a small village live, then her knowledge is solely based on the experience of her youth when she lived in a village in India, that was about the same size at that time. Although her experience gives her access to certain aspects of village life, she is incapable of developing a perfect solution that covers the majority of needs of villagers in today’s Switzerland.
It stands to reason that an innovation only works when we have internalized the needs of our users and developed a thorough understanding of them. It can be achieved when we are where they are, especially when we witness the part of their life we want to improve.
If you now think we’ll present even more tools to observe people in their environment, you’re wrong. Such tools can help us, but ultimately it is all a matter of one decisive point in needfinding: Find out which assumptions you have made in your mind and become aware of them.
In the everyday work of a company, it is a common phenomenon that innovation managers work on ideas that are not based on real needs. Often, when we ask them what doesn’t work in the everyday life of a person that would give their ideas real added value, we are met with a blank stare.
In such cases, it is useless to send out the innovation managers, because they don’t know what they should see and hear. So needfinding does not take place in many companies and is inevitably seen as a waste of time and money.
Many traditional management and innovation consultants rely on so-called customer interviews conducted not by the consultant himself or a market research institute tasked by him. The consultant then picks and chooses from the interviews only those things that match what he has seen or heard and that fit into the reality he has developed over a lifetime. Thus, not infrequently, decisions makers see needfinding as a risk to the success of their project.
If we succeed in embodying an attitude of pure curiosity in needfinding, we find that everything
we learn can guide us to new and even more human-centered solutions.
In needfinding, we recognize things that still don’t work, maybe that never will work, or that we must watch very closely so that, in the end, our innovation meets a need.
HOW MIGHT WE...
free ourselves of assumptions in needfinding?
There are a couple of good tricks that help free you of assumptions. Especially when dealing with needfinding for the first time, the following exercise, which doesn’t take longer than 30 minutes, is highly recommended. When we have somebody who confronts us with tricky questions in this exercise, we will be all the more effective.
The purpose of this method line is to show how assumptions and hypotheses about needs can be made visible and how we succeed in prioritizing critical assumptions. This creates a starting point that enables us to realize a focused and, hence, more successful user interaction.
The starting point is that we have already built an initial simple prototype. Hence the phase of ideation has been concluded for now because we have already found a potential solution for a user need. Within the scope of her “health for seniors” project, Priya has identified the theme of exercise as an approach to a solution.
1. We formulate our idea in one sentence:
For example:
Senior walks for retired “couch potatoes.”
Then we visualize our idea:
2. We formulate the need assumptions of our idea:
As we know, needs are the actual motivations of people. They emerge from the desire to make something possible that does not exist (in our example: staying healthy) or to get rid of something not wanted (e.g., losing weight). In design thinking, we often define these needs as verbs. Needs refer to WHAT the user wants to achieve—we consciously put aside solution-oriented thinking, which is focused on the HOW.
To identify need assumptions, we first ask the following questions:
What does the user want to achieve by applying our idea?
What motivates the user to use our idea?
What prevents the user from using our idea?
Possible answers include:
Couch potatoes want to exercise (need) in order to prevent chronic diseases (need).
Retirees don’t have the necessary daily structure (trigger) to exercise on a regular basis (need).
Senior citizens want to feel healthy (need) so they can go on excursions with their grandchildren.
Senior citizens feel uncomfortable (emotional state/blocker) when they exercise at the fitness center together with young people.
Write each of these assumptions on a separate Post-it.
Then you can place the Post-its on a grid in step 5.
3. We identify the critical assumptions:
First of all, it is important for us to take a few minutes to reflect upon our assumptions of needs.
What will we recognize in this phase of reflection? Perhaps we recognize we’ve dealt with the basic needs of our potential innovation—often, a wonderful crop of assumptions on which we have built our solution! Now these needs must be reviewed and adapted, if necessary.
With this exercise, we are confronted with the basis of our ideas without having heard or seen whether a potential user actually has a need for such an innovation in his everyday life.
Maybe we have found a couple of colleagues from among our friends who think our solution is good. Now it would be exciting for us to find out whether the parents and grandparents of our friends really have these problems in everyday life. With this step, we have gotten very close to our user. At the same time, we must be aware that we are still dealing with assumptions. We have not yet heard or seen whether these needs actually exist out there in real life.
We’ll have no choice but to review these needs—this time, not with our work colleagues! We must observe and interview people who are not close to us and who won’t react positively to our ideas because they like us or don’t want to dampen our enthusiasm.
4. We are ready for random encounters:
What would we ask users in our target group if we met them by chance on the street now? In order to be prepared, we should seriously consider what question would we use to approach somebody to tell us about their everyday life. Priya, for example, ought to think about where and when she can meet retirees during the week in their everyday lives (e.g., shopping, on a trip, on the train, at the bus stop, etc.).
The good news for Priya is that she doesn’t have to take a single day off to conduct a needfinding. She can simply integrate it into her everyday life.
What is needfinding really about?
We must leave our comfort zone and speak to people in order to get a look at ideas from a new angle. We must be willing to learn new things and stay curious, enriching our knowledge step by step.
5. We review the critical assumptions first:
We should ask ourselves about which assumptions we know least and which are most critical for our idea. It’s best we review these assumptions first.
If these assumptions do not exist in everyday life, we have built our solution idea on a mental castle in the air. This is not so bad, because the sooner we recognize it, the better it is for us. It saves a lot of money, time, and energy. We can use the freed-up resources to hunt for the next big market opportunity.
The review of the critical assumptions can be structured in the shape of four quadrants. Using the dimensions of “incidental” versus “decisive” and “knowing” versus “ignorant” has served us well in the past.
HOW MIGHT WE...
conduct a needfinding interview?
Every interview should have a logical sequence. We recommend planning the course of the interview in advance and then reflecting upon it.
With proper preparation, you become calmer, and this makes it easier for you to gain the trust of the interviewee.
A typical needfinding conversation might look like this:
1. Introduction
First, we introduce ourselves and explain the reason for the request as well as the course of the interview. In so doing, we emphasize that there is no “true” or “false” and ask whether we are allowed to document the interview (e.g., video, photos, or audio recording). The main point is to create an atmosphere in which the respondent feels comfortable. Respondents must have the feeling they are appreciated and understand that their knowledge and experience are valuable to us.
2. Actual beginning
The interviewees can also introduce themselves at the beginning, so a simple reference to the problem is easily established. We commence the interview with a general and open question about the actual theme. Based on the answer, we go deeper with questions that expand and clarify the issue. What’s important is that the people questioned feel comfortable and we win their trust.
3. Create reference
We try to find a recent example that the person remembers well. This way, we bring the person closer to the topic and the problems. It might happen that not all the problems or critical experiences are expressed in this example or on the same day. Continue to build trust, assure the interviewees that their answers are important, good, and helpful to us. If the desired depth is not reached yet, we are patient and ask for more experiences and stories.
4. Grand tour
Deepen other critical topics and search for contradictions. Get to the bottom of details if possible. This can refer to both tangible and emotional facts. We have reached our goal when things that were hidden come to light. If the interviewees trust us, they can open up and share exciting stories and needs with us that would have remained hidden in a normal interview.
5. Reflection
We pause for a moment and then come to the end of the interview. We express our gratitude for the important findings and summarize the main points from our point of view. Often, the person interviewed adds important things, points out inconsistencies, and emphasizes important items. At this point, we can ask the “why” question and dig deeper,
if necessary. In this phase, we are free to switch to a more general level in order to discuss explanations or theories on the matter under discussion.
6. Wrap-up
Don’t turn off the recording device yet! Often, the most intriguing things occur at the very end, so we should give the end enough space and time. We thank the interviewee again for the conversation, the time spent with us, and the insights we gained. We give the interviewee the opportunity to ask us questions. After the interview, we reflect on it by summarizing the most important findings, both in terms of content and approach.
EXPERT TIP
Ask open questions
Most people are uncomfortable asking open-ended questions. The situation happens every day, and most of us are familiar with it:
Priya waits for tram 5 in front of the Pension Management Institute in Zurich. The waiting time amounts to 9 minutes. An elderly lady is standing next to Priya, also waiting for tram 5 and looking rather bored. At that moment, Priya can think of a thousand reasons why needfinding doesn’t bring any added value anyway and that she will probably find another elderly lady at the tram stop tomorrow. Most of us feel the same as Priya during this phase. Nearly everybody feels uncomfortable and even a little embarrassed to approach strangers. Priya is definitely not alone in this respect. But what can really happen to her? She is merely interested in the lives of others so as to enrich her idea with knowledge and deepen her insights.
Priya works up the courage to start a conversation, but how should she begin and how would she place her questions?
The Design Thinking Playbook Page 6