"Human-centered design is as much about your head as your hands. These Mindsets explore and uncover the philosophy behind our approach to creative problem solving, and show that how you think about design directly affects whether you'll arrive at innovative, impactful solutions."
"Mindsets" from DesignKit.org
As we shared in the empathy stage, you are building your challenge approach based on a real need that you've observed and learned from understanding your audience. This exercise is meant to bridge the gap to defining a concrete question that you seek to answer with your work.
"When you move from empathy work to drawing conclusions from that work, you need to process all the things you heard and saw in order to understand the big picture and grasp the takeaways of it all. Unpacking is a chance to start that process – sharing what you found with fellow designers and capturing the important parts in a visual form. Get all the information out of your head and onto a wall where you can start to make connections—post pictures of your user, post-its with quotes, maps of journeys or experiences—anything that captures impressions and information about your user. This is the beginning of the synthesis process, which leads into a ‘Define’ mode."
From the d.School Designer Resource Guide
In the Define stage, you have one simple goal - to craft a meaningful and actionable problem statement that is informed by the information collected in the Empathy stage. Easier said than done, this challenge statement should be focused, human-centered and cohesive.
Importantly, your challenge statement should not be a rehashing of a problem. Rather, it is a question that relates to the needs of your user, key insights you've gleaned from addressing those needs, and a call to action to build something meaningful for the user.
Some items to consider as you write your question:
A great technique for framing your challenge statement is to construct it as a "How might we..." question. This will allow you think about a) what your user needs and b) how you might be able to meet that need with open possibilities for your design work. You can refine and hone this question with a technique called How-Why Laddering. You take that "how" question, and ask a "why" question that gets to why it is important, meaningful or relevant. This can help you dig into what is truly the crux of the issue and why your design work will help to address it.