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What is a Problem Statement?

If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.”- Albert Einstein.  A Problem Statement is a description of what user issue you are trying to address. Although the word “problem” does normally does normally provoke a negative connotation, the problem statement does not have to be a pain point. It can also be a goal your user is trying to achieve through your product/site/service.

Why Create a Problem Statement?

You can’t solve a problem until you’re asking the right question. Imagine you are designing and building a custom house, but you don’t know the needs or desires of the buyer. Or maybe you are making a wedding cake, but you don’t know the amount of guests or even favorite flavor or allergies of the bride and groom. You wouldn’t get very far. In order to help your user meet their goals or solve their frustrations, you must first understand what the problem is. The problem statement provides you with a clear focus for your product, service or site and aligns your efforts to your user’s needs.

How to Create a Problem Statement

There are different ways that you can address a problem statement including using the “How Might We” method. However the key points to remember are that the problem statement should no address more than one problem, should not assign cause or blame and should not offer a solution. The purpose of this statement is to define the issue and based on the statement develop innovative solutions. One way to create your problem statement is to answer the following questions:

  • Who: Who is trying to achieve this goal or is affected by this issue?
  • What: What happens or needs to happen?
  • When: When is this occurring or when does it need to occur?
  • Where: Where does it happen or where does it need to happen?
  • Why: Why is it important that this is addressed?

Once you answer these questions. Compile the information to create your problem statement

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What is a Problem Statement?

When you want to create an actionable problem statement which is commonly known as the Point of View (POV) in Designing Thinking you should always base your Point Of View on a deeper understanding of your specific users, their needs and your most essential insights about them. In the Design Thinking process, you will gain those insights from your research and fieldwork in the Empathise mode.

Problem statements help everyone focus on what’s important and help you tie research goals to issues everyone wants to solve. Maintaining a list of known problems helps justify and get buy-in for research activities. Problem statements also suggest metrics you can measure to track improvement over time. Sometimes these statements will also include questions. Related issues can be combined into one problem statement, so you may end up with fewer problem statements than top issues. If that is the case, you will need to prioritize the problem statements — using either the issue priorities determined in step 3 or some other method.

Encourage stakeholders to participate in this step as well. It’s much easier to get people to accept and act on the results of a user study when they have been part of the process.

  • Explain that the purpose of the meeting is to help decide what is most important to test first, and how.
  • Share the detailed list of issues from step 3 with everyone.
  • Write the issue names on a big whiteboard (or share a document for writing text together, if your team is distributed), leaving blank space under each for the problem statements.
    • Combine related issues into problem statements; for example:
    Problem: People call customer service because they can’t find instructions on how to set up their networked lighting system or because they don’t understand the instructions. Calls are expensive for the company, and customers are angry when they call.
  • Prioritize problem statements for testing, either by combining issue scores (as in step 3) or by voting.

    • For Each Problem Statement, List Research Goals

    Problem statements suggest goals for the study. For example, given the problem statement above, here are some corresponding study goals:

    • Discover where in the process people need instructions.
    • Learn why people can’t find the instructions.
    • Determine the best locations to put the instructions.
    • Find instructions that need improvement.
    • Find opportunities to improve the product in order to minimize instructions.

    Some research goals can’t be addressed with usability testing. In those cases, note which methods would be better to use (for example, a survey or analytics) and set those goals aside.

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    Download Problem statement worksheet (PDF)