Identify insights and decision opportunities

Once you have a map of the ‘as is’ journey for your service, the next step is to draw insights.

Insights are short statements that give us enough shared understanding to take an action. Insights are simple and should be used to challenge how we think about problems we are trying to solve.

A good insight:

tells us what people are doing (behaviour)
tells us why people are doing it (motivation) and some ideas about how to design for it (actions)
provokes us into assigning actions
will be recognisable to our users

Every insight is an opportunity for design. We can do this by creating ‘how might we’ statements, which turn opportunities from the research into design challenges.

You can see ‘how might we’ statements as:

how - solution oriented
might - optimistic
we - collaborative

‘How might we’ statements are challenging to get right. They need to be broad enough that they offer a wide range of solutions, but narrow enough to have helpful boundaries.

For example:

too narrow: how might we create a cone to eat ice cream without dripping?
too broad: how might we redesign dessert?
properly scoped: how might we redesign ice cream to be more portable?

Find out more about insights by reading: