Samuel FabayoProduct designer and design educator

How to solve complex problems as a product or UX Designer #design #tech #ux #problemsolving

9 Apr 2024 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker emphasizes that mastering systems thinking is crucial for product designers who aim to be among the top 1% of their field, because most design challenges are inherently complex. To apply systems thinking, the speaker recommends the 5 Whys framework—a simple, repeatable method for drilling down to a problem’s root cause. The process involves asking "why" up to five times, each answer leading to a deeper layer of understanding. Even if fewer than five iterations are needed, the exercise often uncovers the underlying issue, enabling designers to address problems at their source rather than merely treating symptoms.

Chapters

It is very, very important as a product designer if you want to be in the top 1% to apply systems thinking to complex problems, because most of the problems that you start to solve will be complex problems anyways. So you need to start applying systems thinking to problems and making sure that you get to the root cause of the problem before you provide a solution to it. And one of the ways that you can do this is to use the 5 Whys framework, which is a very, very easy framework to apply systems thinking to a problem. In the 5 Whys framework, what you're basically doing is whenever you have a challenge, and I want you to try this with your next challenge that you have at work, whenever you have a challenge, you can always ask why 5 times, and you can do this alone. So ask why the first time and talk about the reason why you're solving that problem or the reason why that is a problem. Then ask why and try to go a level deeper. Sometimes you might not even get up to 5 whys, but by the time you're done with 5 whys, there's a chance that you're going to get to the root cause of the problem and you can start treating that problem from the roots.