In my opinion, one of the most surprising aspects of the defining stage was how effective “How Might We” questions were at zeroing in on our company’s issues that we are trying to combat. Going into last class, I felt that our group had a solid idea about the problems that Facebook is dealing with based on the previous research we had conducted. However, one piece that we were missing was how that all tied in with our personas. For example, like many social media platforms, Facebook seems to be negatively contributing to the mental health of their users, in certain scenarios. However, this pain point manifests itself in different ways for our different personas. Studies have shown that this issue mainly effects Facebook’s younger audience more so than its older users. The persona we broke down was a middle-aged soccer mom, who may not directly have mental health issues with the platform, but it could certainly impact her children. One of the HMW questions we developed on the issue was “How might we make parents comfortable with allowing their children to use a platform that is shown to adversely impact mental health?” Now this certainly doesn’t give us an obvious solution, but it definitely is a much more focused issue other than just mental health in general. By considering the vantage point of a persona, especially one that you are not a part of, helps expand the realm in which you are working in.
One of the biggest challenges that I felt throughout the defining process was narrowing down our “How Might We” questions, without discarding valid points or combining questions that we’re not completely related. The vetting process of finding the top three or four questions was extremely difficult, as it is impossible to tackle all the issues a company is facing within this limited space. However, this forced us to take a step back and find what we thought to be the most important of the bunch, which is very valuable to the process. Also, I believe that this helped us think about which issues fit our expertise and that we had the most realistic chance of creating a viable solution.
There was one instance where my group was looking to combine a few of our questions into one bin, but I was worried that we were over-simplifying by taking too low of a common denominator. After some further discussion we settled on the fact that one of the proposed HMW questions could actually serve as a preliminary step to a potential solution for the other questions were ultimately trying to answer. While the goal of the exercise was not to begin formulating a solution, it definitely got the ball rolling for how we will approach it down the road. This also posed another challenge: not getting too far ahead of ourselves. I really like the Einstein quote, “If I had 60 minutes to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes defining it, and 5 minutes solving it”. Being able to define all the dimensions to a problem is a necessary step to finding the right solution. If you jump ahead too quickly and begin forming your solution before the problem is fully understood, you will likely run into issues down the road.