To get the right answers you have to find the right questions first. I can help you with both.
Immersing in the context and walking a mile in the shoes of the ones you design for is essential to find the most important questions you have to give a meaningful answer to. This ensures that you make your decisions about your product or service based on real life data and solid knowledge not just a hypothesis.
Equipped with a tried researcher mindset, I simply cannot underline enough the importance of a well designed exploration that helps you validate your hypothesis before investing too much hard work in something that nobody wants later. Or maybe wants but just not exactly the way you first imagined.
Even in the case of the best ideas you have to go through a number of iterations before you arrive at a desirable, feasible and viable product or service. The key to this is to understand the people involved in the situation (stakeholders), explore their needs and motives, the things they want to achieve (jobs to be done), the things that withhold them from doing this (pains) and the benefits they get if they can do what they want (gains).
The good news is that this exploration is almost as creative a process as the brainstorming on solutions. Though you have to make sure that the observation and the research is unbiased and you have to be disciplined on the execution (more science than art at this stage), finding out which is the best way to get to know what you have to know is a delightful challenge.
Think like a good detective and find the key motives that drive the people you design for.
Make observations of the situation they are in: how they behave, what they use, how they solve problems, how they explore alternatives, what are their habits and routines. Ask them about their goals, feelings, motives, considerations. Find out who / what solution they turn to now in order to solve their problems - they are you competitors. Draw the landscape of your competitors - you can learn a lot by understanding what answers they gave to the problem of your potential users. This also helps you later to differentiate yourself from their products/ services.
Research and validation tools help you throughout your journey in product / service design, you return to them in each phase from ideation to testing.
With almost 20 years of experience in my pocket, I can help you planning, executing, evaluating research, boiling down insights, creating and validating product concepts based on these insights, and supporting you in making the right product decisions all along the way.
Reach out and let us find out what can support you best in your situation.
Exploring the context
What is the problem you are solving? Who are the stakeholders involved? What are they trying to achieve? What are the key factors affecting the situation?
Interviews, observations and ethnography can help you explore the context. Creating maps, descriptions, visualization makes it easier to highlight what is important.
Empathizing the user
We have to get to know the people involved (stakeholders/ actors). Based on interviews and observations we can understand their wants, needs, feelings, goals, motivation.
Empathy map (jobs to be done, pains and gains), user personas help to visualize the key factors we can build on.
Drawing the market landscape
Who else is working on the same problem? How did they approach it? What have they achieved? What can we learn from their mistakes and successes? What is covered and where is still place? Where is a promising position on the market we can aim for?
Desk research and competitor analysis are helping to create a clear market landscape.
Boiling down the insights
Summarizing the insights, the goals and the influencing factors in the Value proposition canvas helps to get a clear overview of where we want to go.
A clear product concept can be created based on data we have gathered so far.
Test and learn from the feedback
Creating a product is never linear. Testing gives you invaluable feedback in every phase based on that you can iterate the product or service to find the real fit with user needs. Tools for testing are numerous and depend very much on the nature of the product and the phase of development.
They embrace classic qualitative and quantitative research tools, UX research methods, online or offline, from concept validation to product testing, and more.