How to define product design issues

In the overview of the design process, we learned that design begins with a gap in the perception of everyday experience, a process that is more about individual sensitivity, curiosity and attitude, and it is difficult to use a methodology to guide this process. So, let's start by defining the problem and discuss the latter three aspects of the design process in detail.

The goal of defining the problem is to define exactly what we want to solve, and to clarify the purpose of the design. This process can be done in two steps: First, describe the problem. The description of the problem usually comes from the gap in the experience, but not the simple statement of the Gap, Ulrich introduces a simple and practical method to help us describe the problem. The second is to define user requirements. The user needs express what kind of function or form people want to solve the problem described. If the problem description is a strategic layer in the user experience five layer model (see Jesse James Garrett "User Experience Essentials"), it solves the direction problem. User requirements are the scope layer that explains the functional scope required to resolve the problem at the strategic level.

Describe the problem

In the perception of the gap in the experience, the first word will be the gap intuitive expression, but this is not our final description of the problem. Ulrich presents a method of "WHY" and "how": by constantly asking "how", you can get more specific and focused questions, and by constantly asking "WHY," you get broader and more general questions. As shown in the previous illustration, we end up with a list of problem hierarchies of different ranges. So how do we decide which problem to choose as our final problem description? Ulrich's recommended guidelines are: Choose a question that is a little broader than the one you can comfortably handle, but not the one that won't allow you to consider the final result (original: Make the "design problem slightly" than you are Comfortable with, but ' so general ' you do no measurable difference in the outcome.

Define user Requirements

The definition of user requirements here includes requirements collection, demand analysis, and demand-collation content. Limited to space, this article is only a brief description of the entire process, interested readers can take part in the course to understand the specific practices, and "Everyone is Product Manager" in the book on demand management has detailed elaboration.

Defining user requirements can be done in the following five steps:

1 Contact with users, can observe, interview and other means to understand their design problems and needs;

2 collection of raw data from the user, the data form may include questionnaires, interviews, audio and video recordings;

3 The original data coding, usually with an objective presentation form to form a demand description;

4 According to the Kano demand model, indicate the excitation demand;

5 Set priority for the requirement;

Where steps 1 and 2 belong to demand collection, the industry has a lot of mature methods, according to the specific design problems to choose the appropriate method. and steps 3, 4 and 5 belong to the category of requirement analysis. In the formation of the requirements of the description, should be careful not to bring subjective emotions. The requirement description should be as clear as the original data, which is a property of the target product and should not imply the design idea or implementation form when describing. Identifying requirements types and setting priorities requires the analyst to have some experience. After the requirements analysis is completed, requirements can be categorized according to similarity, and a basic requirement is selected or refined from each class. Further, the requirement can be screened and sorted according to the overlap and mutual exclusion.

At this point, we've identified the purpose of the design: what problems to address and what features to cover to solve the problem. The next article discusses how to explore the solution.