Cut through the noise and get to the real design problem
Have you ever been briefed on a project, only for it to change half way through?
Have you delivered what a client or team said they wanted only to be met with a new or different question or problem?
Have you ever been weeks deep in research only to discover that the team is solving the wrong problem for the wrong users?
It’s probably because you didn’t get a really good answer to the most important question on a UX project.
Why this is happening
It’s easy to get excited when you get briefed on a shiny new project. You want to leap in and start designing solutions, right?
Wrong.
In fact one of the most important thing I get to teach young UXers is the ability to pause the certainty and the assumptions (#NeverAssume) and ask more questions.
And thanks to a clever UX chap I met a few years ago, I discovered the killer question that will stop everyone — you, the design team, the client, the stakeholders everyone — in their tracks.
OK, so what is it?
What you need to find out is not what people are asking for, but what the project needs. Because it could be a lot more complex, or a lot more simple, or completely different than you think. And no one wants to waste their time on the wrong brief.
How do you find that out at the beginning of project? Ask this simple question:
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
Why does this work?
Asking this outright and repeatedly, and playing back what you are hearing, focuses your client and team on agreeing what the brief really is.
It makes people stop waffling and instead form a specific statement of intent
It consolidates what can be a long list of requests and ideas from multiple stakeholders into a simple problem-to-be-solved that the whole team can agree on
It reveals mismattch between stakeholders who have all assumed that they are aligned when they’re not (again, #NeverAssume)
It gives you verbatim to play back throughout the project, demonstrating how everything you and your team is doing is working towards solving The Problem
It gives you a north star that you can use — and change — if your project or The Problem changes for any reason
It protects you from the worst parts of scope creep, or at least ensures you’re not responsible for it.
The problem statement
The most important thing to do having answered this question to everyone’s satisfaction, and before the project gets underway is to:
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