How to Build User Problem Statement: Formula and Benefits

To start defining the design problem, we’ll need to synthesize everything we’ve learned in the empathize stage, including pain points, personas, user stories, and user journeys.

A problem statement is a clear description of the user’s needs that should be addressed.

• Human-centred.
• Broad enough to allow for some creative freedom
• Narrow enough to be solved by a design solution.

Problem statement formula

The user’s name, characteristics, need, and the reason for the need

• Start with the name of the user.
• Add a short description of the user’s characteristics.
• Clearly describe the user’s need
• Explain why the user has that need. In other words, you are developing an insight into the user.

Problem statement benefits

• Help to establish goals. Tells you what the user really needs.
• Help to understand constraints. We want to know what’s keeping users from satisfying their needs.
• Help to define deliverables. When we finally solve the problem, what will we have to show for it? It’s helpful to know what our solution will produce.
• Help to create benchmarks for success. How will we know when we succeed?

Pain points categories:

• Financial, or money-related pain points.
• Product, which are pain points related to quality issues.
• Process, which are pain points related to the user’s journey.
• Support, which are pain points related to getting help from customer service.

The 5 Ws and H: who, what, when, where, why, and how

The most common framework used to create problem statements is the 5 Ws and H framework.

• Who is experiencing the problem? Knowing your users and their background is key to creating successful solutions for them.
• What are the pain points you’re trying to solve? Determining a user’s pain points early allows you to answer the rest of these questions and clarify the context of the pain points.
• Where is the user when they’re using the product? A user’s physical context matters to your design.
• When does the problem occur? Maybe it’s right after the end of a long and tedious process, or maybe it’s something that happens daily. Knowing when the problem occurs can help you better empathize with the user’s feelings.
• Why is the problem important? Knowing how this problem affects your user’s experience and life will help to clarify the potential consequences.
• How are users reaching their goals by using the product? it allows you to map the user journey that they take through your product.

Problem statements provide clarity about your users’ goals and help UX designers identify constraints that prevent users from meeting those goals. Problem statements also help your team measure success.

Brainstorming solutions is similar to making a hypothesis or an educated guess about how to solve the problem. In UX design, we write possible solutions to the problem as hypothesis statements.

A hypothesis statement writes out our best-educated guess on what we think the solution to a design problem might be.

Hypothesis statements don’t have a standard formula, but there are two common methods for building them. First, you can use an “if / then” statement to come up with a hypothesis. The second common method for building hypothesis statements is “we believe” statements.

“If/then” statements focus directly on the needs of your users. “We believe” statements take the perspective of your team into account while remaining empathetic to the needs of your users.

If-then statement. If (name an action), then (name an outcome).

Empathizing with users allows you to consider the experience from the users’ perspectives and discover their likes, dislikes, and pain points.

Defining involves sorting through the user research you collected during the empathize phase. Analyzing that user research helps you create a problem statement.

Your job as a UX designer is to use your creativity and problem-solving skills to decide which solutions work best for the unique users you’re designing for.

Hypothesis statements help you narrow down your research insights into goals for your product, so you can stay focused on the wants and needs of your users.

A problem statement is a clear description of a user need that should be addressed. A hypothesis statement communicates your best educated guess on what you think the solution might be to the problem described by your problem statement.

Your hypothesis statement will communicate a practical design solution to the problem defined by your problem statement.

Formulate your hypothesis

• Determine an action that could be taken to solve your user’s need
• Specify the outcome that you expect from the “action”
• If necessary, reword your if/then statement to make your hypothesis more flexible.

But hypothesis statements don’t have a standard form and sometimes an if/then statement may sound unnatural. So, you should feel free to reword your if/then statement to create a statement that’s more flexible.

The matching hypothesis statements express a clear design goal and the criteria for success:

• By stating a specific action they tell us what our solution should enable the user to do.
• By stating the desired outcome they give a specific accomplishment. This helps determine whether the solution was successful in meeting the user’s needs.

Build a problem statement

• Step 1: Add a user name to the problem statement. (add the name of the persona)
• Step 2: Add a short description of the user’s characteristics. Add your persona’s main characteristic, or a description that summarizes this type of user.
• Step 3: Clearly describe the user’s needs. What is the specific need that you’ve identified for this user persona?
• Step 4: Explain why the user has that need. In other words, use the “because” statement to describe an insight into what benefit or improvement would result if the persona’s need was fulfilled.

Value propositions summarize why a consumer should use a product or service.

Everything that your product has to offer might seem obvious to you, but you have to put yourself in the mind of your users. Users don’t know your product or understand its value yet. That’s where value propositions come in.

• What does your product do? Clearly explain the offering that your product provides users.
• Why should the user care? Describe how your product addresses users’ pain points.

How to define your product’s unique value proposition

• Step 1. Describe your product’s features and benefits. Create a list of all the great features and benefits of your product, big and small. Don’t hold back; list everything that comes to mind and then narrow it down later.
• Step 2. Explain the value of the product. Anything that you identify as a value proposition needs to be beneficial to your users. The giant list of features and benefits from step one is sorted into categories.
• Step 3. Connect these features and benefits with the needs of your users. The goal is to identify what’s truly valuable to the user and not just a cool feature that users didn’t ask for. To determine value, take the personas you’ve developed and pair each persona with a value proposition that meets their biggest pain point.
• Step 4. Review your official value proposition list. You’ve narrowed your list down of lots of benefits and features by matching them with actual user needs. Now it’s time to review the list of value propositions your product offers.

Some of these features and benefits are also offered by your competitors. So how do you know what makes your product stand out from the competition? Identify your app’s unique value proposition. This means reviewing the list of value propositions that match your personas and removing those that your competition also offers.

One way to check out your product’s competitors is to read reviews. Sort the reviews from lowest to highest, and closely examine what reviewers are sharing about your competition.

Value propositions need to be short, clear, and to the point. Users want to be able to easily identify exactly how your product will meet their unique needs and what sets your product apart in the market. Sometimes users won’t know what they need until you explain it to them. That’s the real heart of product design innovation.

The human factor describes the range of variables humans bring to their product interactions.

Common human factors that inform design:

1. Impatience
2. Limited memory
3. Needing analogies
4. Limited concentration
5. Changes in need
6. Needing motivation
7. Prejudices
8. Fears
9. Making errors
10. Misjudgment

TL;DR stands for Too long; didn’t read.

Mental models are internal maps that allow humans to predict how something will work.

Feedback loops refer to the outcome a user gets at the end of a process.

If your user takes an action, it’s important that they get some kind of confirmation that the action worked or that it didn’t.

Von Restorff effect or isolation effect, states that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.

A call-to-action, or CTA, is a visual prompt that tells the user to take action.

The serial position effect, says that when people are given a list of items, they are more likely to remember the first few and the last few, while the items in the middle tend to blur.

Hick’s law, states that the more options a user has, the longer it takes for them to make a decision. if the number of choices increases, the time to make a decision increases in proportion.

You don’t want to exploit the user. You only want to encourage them. You don’t want to overpower the user. You want to empower them.

With a little psychology, creativity, and empathy, what starts as a limitation can end up as a benefit.