Case Study: Defining Problem Statements for Google’s UX Design Certificate

Moving from the Design phase to the Define phase

This article is part of an ongoing personal journal, where I talk about my experience taking Google’s UX Professional Certificate on Coursera. This article covers topics discussed in Week 4 of Course 2: Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate.

During week 3, we were still working on the Empathize step of the Design Thinking process by creating user stories and journey maps. Now in week 4 we’ve moved on to the next step — Define.

As a reminder, for this part of the course, we are creating a digital consumer product from start to finish. My project is to create a shopping app for a seed catalog company in Virginia.

The Define phase is all about using the data we gained in the Empathize phase to get really clear about what exact problems we will solve for our users.

The main topics covered in Week 4 are:

• Creating Problem Statements
• Creating Hypothesis Statements
• Defining a Value Proposition

Creating the problem statement and hypothesis statements was essentially a two-step process, as one follows the other.

The goal of each of these processes is to help UX designers establish design goals and define deliverables. The course explains them like this:

• A problem statement is a clear description of a user need that should be addressed.
• A hypothesis statement communicates your best educated guess on what you think the solution might be to the problem described by your problem statement.

First I went over all the data I gathered by Empathizing with the Personas I created and their pain points.

Sarah’s main pain points are time & concern about plants that will grow well in her area and with her skill level.

Bill’s main pain points are needing time to review and compare seeds in a distraction-free place, and having poor vision and low tech skills.

I came up with these problem statements:

Basically the problem statements are run-on sentences that answer the who, what, where, when and why of our user’s problems.

I definitely had to re-write these a few times to make sure I was hitting all the important details. One thing I wasn’t sure of how to include was the when/where. Both of these users would experience the problem of wanting to look at seeds and buy them at home — but maybe at a friends house, waiting at an airport, or at work as well. So anytime they have some spare time to browse an app. But I was unsure of how to add this to my problem statements. In the end, I felt like they were defined enough so I let it go.

Moving on to the hypothesis statements:

These are supposed to define both an action and an outcome. Here’s what I came up with:

If Sarah downloads the seed catalog app, then she can easily sort through seeds by type, check user reviews, and order the best plants for her zone.

If Bill downloads the seed catalog app and makes a user account, then he can save seeds to his personal library to research and compare at his own pace.

Notice that I didn’t include any details about making things accessible for Bill’s low vision. I wasn’t sure if I should include specific details about this here, to be honest. We haven’t gotten to the Ideate step yet. I do have several ideas for making things easier for Bill, like audio descriptions of the plant details, or videos. But we aren’t supposed to be deciding on specific features yet in the course. Anyways, I can’t rework these forever — so I called it good and moved on.

The final step was to create our value proposition.

The course describes it like so: “Value propositions summarize why a consumer should use a product or service.”

They use Gmail as an example —

“Check out a product you might recognize — Gmail — and ask yourself if you can identify a few of its value propositions. When Google debuted Gmail in 2004, they were entering an already crowded market of free email services. Gmail offered:

• The ability to send and receive emails for free
• Email sorting, archiving, and starring functions
• Spam filtering for inboxes
• Email conversation views
• 1 gigabyte of cloud storage

Two of the items on that list were unique offerings that no other email services provided at the time: email conversation views, which put individual emails in the context of a larger thread, and an entire gigabyte of storage, which was 1,000 times the amount of storage that competitors offered. Those were Gmail’s unique value propositions.”

As a funny personal note, I am friends with Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail. I DM’d him on Instagram to tell him that my course was using his creation as a case example, and sent him a screenshot of the above. He messaged me back, “They forgot to include search!” I guess the Google team forgot that searching emails wasn’t a standard feature before Gmail. Hehe!

Anyways, this is what I came up with for my value proposition:

Organic Seed Catalog App makes it simple to find and order quality heirloom and organic seeds with a beautiful and easy-to-use interface.

I haven’t done any branding or thought of a name for my company yet, so please excuse the generic name!

Anyways, that’s a wrap on week 4! This one was a little hefty — it’s surprisingly hard to come up with clear, specific details for these statements.

On to week 5 — we will be covering lots of different design ideation techniques and doing competitive audits. Wish me luck!

Cheers, Rachel