Why is Design Challenge used?
Design Challenge helps us synthesize and prioritize the information that we have gathered. In the previous steps, we made our multiple hypotheses regarding the business challenges (in the business hypothesis stage). We also validated these hypotheses (in the Customer Perspective step).
In this step, we do the root cause analysis of the validated hypothesis or challenges. Then prioritization of the design challenges is done according to the customer relevance and business goal fulfillment. Here, we define the problems in a precise manner and identify the key problems that need to be addressed.
Breakdown of the process
The design team and the executive team diagnose the design challenges symptoms. We need specialists from different domains of the business to help us with the details and help us to delve deeper in our techniques. The ultimate goal here is to find and prioritize our design challenges. We can follow a series of steps mentioned below to properly execute this step of the process.
- Experience maps overlap: We take the experience maps created in the customer perspective step and put them together. The problems with the highest overlap are the highest priority business challenges. The highest individual peaks follow next. Finally, we address the medium overlaps and medium individual peaks.
- Root cause tool: Here we use the 5-Why technique. If we ask 5 whys for any problem statement, we would be able to get to the bottom of the problem or the root cause. We might end up with one of the 3 causes:
- Physical aspect: Building, location, geographical constricts, etc.
- Human: A particular position held by an employee. It is important to focus on why not who.
- Organizational: Office policies, guidelines, automation, etc. are included in the organizational aspects.
- Design Challenge Definition: We need a structure to define the design challenge. This includes the stakeholder (the one who’ll take action), the need (on what action is required), and the context (why the challenge needs addressing).
- Design Challenge Prioritization: We consider our two major factors here:
- Customer Relevance: How a particular design challenge will affect the experience of our customers.
- Business goal Fulfillment. How our business goals will be achieved by solving a particular design challenge.
The ones that rank high on both the above-mentioned factors become our highest priority.
Following the above steps helps us achieve our primary goal of analyzing the design challenges and preparing for the subsequent steps of the design thinking process.
Takeaways from Design Challenge
Here we have taken the key problems to identify the root causes of the problems. In order to ensure that we are solving the right challenges, we prioritized our problems for the next step of the design thinking process. Now, we have identified the challenges that would have the maximum impact ensuring that we have taken the context into account.
In ideation (step 4 of the design thinking process), we generate as many solutions to the business problem as possible. We apply various tools to the key problems that we have identified above to generate solutions. This forms an important step before we create an actual prototype to test in the market.