5 Ways to Write Clear Problem Statement in UX Discovery

UX research begins with an entry point where a problem statement is required in order to collect data. The statement can be an improvement statement, a hypothesis, a business idea, or any entrepreneurial inspiration.

Creating a problem statement ensures that your team, including stakeholders and clients, is on the same page about who you are designing for, the problem you plan to solve, and the importance of doing so.

As a result, to work toward the same design goals as a whole team by expressing these things through a thoughtful, user-focused problem statement is what you want to achieve.

This article will take you through the anatomy of the problem statements in UX discovery.

You’ll get the answers to what problem statements are and how to write one for your use case.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

A problem statement is the brief of a user pain point that needs to be solved with design.

In other words, a problem statement is an actionable summary of your user’s goals and the issues that must be addressed to satisfy them.

The problem statements have a clear direction for the user experience, although they don’t include any design details or user behavior. Instead, they inform you of your reasons for designing user experiences in the first place.

Using a problem statement, a team can focus on the issues they need to address and solve. It defines the boundaries of the investigation and outlines what must be accomplished. A well-crafted problem statement can be used to gain stakeholder support for investigating and resolving a challenge.

People often discuss UX Design challenges in terms of users’ pain or desires, but frankly, users aren’t even aware of what they have to solve or struggle with.

There is a famous quote by Henry Ford that perfectly supports this claim of ours.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

It’s a wonderful example of how we should keep digging for answers and seek the cause of issues rather than accepting the answers users give us.

Enough for the theory, let’s read some of the best problem statements in UX discovery:

The research for the problem statement goes through several checkpoints. The UX researchers/designers need to go through the following in order to come up with problem statements that make sense:

If you want to come up with a user-centric problem statement in UX discovery. It’s better if you start from the user’s perspective.

Following are different ways you can extract the problem statements from the users:

You use the data you gathered during the empathize phase to answer the key queries: who, what, where, when, and why in the 5 Ws technique.

Whether you’re working with other members of the group or researching on your own, you’ll ask and answer questions beginning with the 5 Ws.

You’ll be able to describe who your users are, what they want, where they’ll use your product when the problem occurs, and why their problem is important by answering these questions.

Now, to construct a problem statement that is centered on the user, you must put into words the most critical observations that came out of your user research, which you then synthesize to arrive at a user-centric problem statement.

The 5 Whys method works much like the 5 Ws technique, except that each question is ‘why.’ This method helps you identify a dilemma’s fundamental cause by repeatedly questioning ‘why’ to your previous answer.

For instance, during user research, you discovered that buyer persona type A (let’s name it Roy) doesn’t have formals to wear at work. In this case, you can use the 5 Whys technique to get to the root of the problem:

The fifth Why indicates that the cause of Roy’s problem is that he doesn’t know which size would fit him, and that’s why he doesn’t buy formals online. As a result, the UX designers’ focus should be on easing out the sizing issue.

For this technique, 5 is just a rule of thumb. You can even ask more or fewer questions to get to the problem’s root.

Now when you’ve found the root of the problem. Now is the time to write the problem statement.

In most cases, not all your users face the same problem. Hence, while writing problem statements, focus on the user personas that face the same problem.

Wonder what user personas are?

When you’re designing a product, your job as a UX designer is to build empathy for your target customers and determine exactly what they want. With user research, you begin by creating a user persona—a fictional representation of your ideal client.

And in this case, the user persona will be the fictional representation of the group of users facing the same problem.

The user personas can be defined with the following key information:

According to Sarah Gibbons of Nielsen Norman Group, a problem statement can be structured in a simple manner using three elements – A user, A need, and A goal.

These three combined in a statement will form an accurate problem statement in the following manner – “[A user] needs [the need] to accomplish [the goal].”

Continuing the previous example, if the user is Roy, the problem statement will be – “Roy (the user) needs a better sizing system in the online app (the need) to buy frequently (the goal).”

When you’re working on a discovery effort, you should keep your problem statement focused on just one problem.

Of course, a single issue may lead to other issues, and you can include those as well. However, if you’re handling too much, you’ll recognize it because you’ll have a lot of unrelated problems.

Also, when writing the problem statement, don’t focus on the solution; leave it for the later part.

At the end of your discovery, you will be in an ideal position to confidently put forward solutions that address the key problem and take into account what you have learned.

The problem statement can be used as the foundation for structuring UX discovery.

For example, if the issue was about improving the online-buying procedure, you would want to learn about ways to make the online buying process faster and simpler.

Once you have an investigation objective, it will be easier to pinpoint the unknowns that need research. For instance, in this example, you’d want to know the following:

When you begin to explore a problem, you might return to your problem statement and improve it—especially if you have discovered its underlying causes or the amount of money it can potentially cost your business.

For example, new areas of interest might be identified through explorative research, which may cause the discovery to shift direction.

Finally, after the discovery process, a problem statement can be used to describe the entire narrative, alongside your findings and recommendations.

Who the problem affects, how it affects them, and why it is important to solve it are all described in problem statements.

So what are you waiting for? Start writing the problem statement.