Understand: Gather existing knowledge, understand users and their goals, expose assumptions and unknowns
The first phase of the design engagement is about understanding the users, their goals and needs, understanding the stakeholders vision for the project, gathering existing knowledge on the business, and exposing assumptions and knowledge gaps.
Throughout the Understand phase, you should be working on understanding the business, who is going to be using the product, what are their goals? what do users currently use and how do they use it? In what situations will the user be using the product or feature? What are their motivations behind using it? What are any outside motivators that might affect their use?
The team should also talk about what they don't know and where there are knowledge gaps. At the end of Understand phase, the team should have established a solid understanding of the users and the problem at hand.
The team should perform industry research to determine trends, and understand industry standards and best practices. The team should also perform extensive research on the client, understand their business processes, and their competitors. Additionally, the team should view pre-existing solutions that may already exist, in order to eliminate the need to 're-invent the wheel' and save time and effort.
Looking at the existing solution, whether it's a report or dashboard, is crucial in understanding how users are accustomed to viewing information. The team ought to use the existing solution to evaluate where the gap is between a user's need and a user's reality. Questions should be drafted around the existing solution to determine what its purpose is, how it fits into a general workflow, and where its pain points are.
The team should have already scheduled and confirmed interviews with multiple resources, at various levels, from client-side.
The team should have started the Running List of AQI (Assumptions, Questions and Ideas), which includes any assumptions, key ideas, and questions that were formed during the Pre-Engagement phase. This checklist will evolve with the project, with items being added and resolved as the engagement progresses. It will also serve useful as a paper trail for future design decisions. The team should use this checklist to help guide interviews and keep track of what is learned.
All team members present at a meeting ought to upload raw notes to a central repository such as SharePoint.
The raw notes can be used to update the Running List of AQI (Assumptions, Questions and Ideas). Design members can decide which assumptions have been addressed, what key ideas and themes were mentioned, and what new questions have arisen.
After a period of debriefing, the design lead should send a Thank You email to the people that were interviewed and include, if possible, a brief list of key items learned, or any pending questions that still exist.
It is valuable to review existing documents to understand what information users currently look at and how they get to the information they need.
User Interviews (Required)
Conducting user interviews is the primary and required method the design team uses in the understand phase. By talking to the users directly, we can learn what they do, what they need and all the reasons behind.
During the interview session, it's always useful to observe the user's interactions with the existing solution. By seeing how a report is read during a meeting or how a user clicks through a dashboard to learn information, the team will be able to gain insights into a user's actual workflow and where their needs are or aren't being met.
During the interview, the designer can perform this activity to dig down deep into what the actual reasons are for a problem or what the problem actually is. It is good to use when the apparent problem seems to only be a symptom of a larger problem.
Running List of AQI (Required)
Throughout the Understand phase, we will ask questions we don’t have answers to and identify assumptions we are relying on. We will update the Running List Of AQI (Assumptions, Questions and Ideas) for later organization and analysis.
We will also be generating a lot of ideas throughout the week. Some of the ideas will be pertinent to the tasks at hand, but others, although interesting, won’t be. We will capture these good but not immediately relevant ‘back-burner ideas’ on a sticky note board.
An Affinity Diagram is a tool that gathers large amounts of language data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organizes them into groupings based on their natural relationships.
- Review existing documents (Required)
- Create data dictionary
- User interviews (Required)
- Observation
- Five why’s
- Affinity mapping
- Update Running List of AQI (Required)