What’s your problem?

Use a hypothesis backlog to capture and refine your problems

As an Experience Designer, I get loads of info about opportunities to give customers a better experience, whether it’s user research, feedback from proxies such as Customer Support, best practices, anecdotal hunches and so on.

There were a few moments that made me realise I needed to track potential problems and improvements:

1. When I introduced myself to someone in an office kitchen and casual chit-chat was quickly replaced with a list of things that could be better about the product I had just started working on
2. Receiving a huge number of usability testing findings from a research piece that wasn’t specifically about the product I was working on. They were side findings (and good ones!) but each of them needed their own discovery work and wouldn’t fit in our backlog and I didn’t want to lose all the info
3. Some people have knowledge about the known problems with a product, but sometimes it’s not listed or compiled somewhere and linked through to the research

I needed a way of packaging problems and opportunities so that I could tell the story to Product, then work together to get a…