Problem discovery and solution discovery

Process & Techniques
#1

So I just joined a team in a medium/large UX driven company a few weeks ago. All my past jobs I was the UXer. Time to test my imposter syndrome and also beef up on terminologies and theories.

My boss has been talking about problem discovery and solution discovery. I can’t find anything when I google it apart from general product discovery. Beyond the obvious of what it says in the title, can anyone send me in the right direction for some information?

#3

Hey Rachel, without diving into methodology details, problem discovery loosely follows the customer discovery process - how can you find a relevant group of research participants and ask them open-ended questions in order for them to share details about the problems they face. I wrote a blog post all about discovery research before that might help. You can find it at: opinionx . co / blog / discovery

  • You can just do these open-ended questions qualitatively through user interviews at a decent volume
  • You can take it into a quant step with keyword frequency analysis on your transcripts
  • You can do the same ^ but with survey open-end responses (grouping into themes, usually manually in a spreadsheet or using tools like Thematic to analyse for keyword groupings automatically)
  • You can use a tool like OpinionX to do both at once (gather open-end responses and organise by importance automatically) if you have a fairly big audience already that can be part of this research

Let me know if you have any other questions - have been working on discovery research for the past 18 months so can share more info if you have follow ups.

Daniel

#4

Check out this list of product discovery methods https://pdmethods.com/ as well as this problem framing toolkit Problem Framing Toolkit | Templates — New Haircut

This should provide you enough information to dive deeper.

#5

Thanks for the responses, everyone. It was the way it was split out that had confused me but I’m now about 60% through my first split project so things are making more sense now.

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