Yesterday I wrote about looking for problems, not solutions. That’s not the way that most people think, so a few people asked me how they go about finding problems? It’s a good question.
There are many ways you can do this. Here are a few of my favourites: –
- Start looking for things that don’t work. Begin to write them down – create a ‘bugs’ notebook.
- Ask your customers what their frustrations are. What problems do they have that you could solve?
- Get good at observation. Become an anthropologist. This is a great video with Tom Kelly of IDEO, which nicely summarises how you can do this.
- What frustrates you? What could be designed better? Next time you’re in the airport imagine how you could redesign check-in, security etc.
Have fun with this, it’ll soon become second nature. I do this all the time now, drives my wife nuts!
Once you’ve got yourself a few problems, then you can start to explore them to see if that problem is the right one to solve, or whether there’s an underlying problem. But that’s a whole other post……..
