Problem Framing and Research Questions

Covers the end to end practice of uncovering, defining, and validating the true problem before designing solutions. Includes techniques for framing ambiguous challenges, performing root cause analysis, and translating business needs into clear problem statements and research objectives. Covers designing and prioritizing research activities including stakeholder and contextual interviews, user interviews, surveys, field research, observational studies, analytics review, competitive and market analysis, and selecting appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods and sample considerations. Emphasizes hypothesis driven research, rapid prototypes and experiments, ethical practice, and using analytics to validate insights. Describes how to set clear success criteria and key performance indicators, surface stakeholder assumptions and constraints, convert vague needs into testable research questions and hypotheses, and produce deliverables such as research plans, personas, user journeys, empathy maps, prioritized findings, and actionable recommendations that inform decisions and design goals.

HardTechnical

39 practiced

Design a repeatable rubric to score research insights by impact, confidence, time-to-implement, customer reach, and cost. Provide example scoring for three hypothetical insights and explain how you would set thresholds for immediate action, further validation, or archival.

EasyTechnical

28 practiced

Explain common root-cause analysis techniques a product designer can use (for example, 5 Whys and fishbone/Ishikawa) and walk through a short worked example analyzing 'shopping cart abandonment' to illustrate how to move from symptom to root causes and candidate research activities.

MediumTechnical

59 practiced

You have two weeks and a $2,000 budget. Stakeholders propose five potential research activities (5 moderated interviews, 200-user survey, session-replay analysis, quick analytics funnel deep-dive, prototype usability test). Describe a framework you would use to prioritize these activities, what trade-offs you'd consider, and propose a recommended plan with rationale.

MediumTechnical

60 practiced

Describe how you would design rapid prototypes and lightweight experiments to validate a top problem hypothesis for a two-sided marketplace. Include choices of fidelity for prototypes, qualitative signal vs quantitative signal thresholds, what to measure in early experiments, and how quickly you would iterate.

HardTechnical

37 practiced

Analytics indicate feature X drives engagement but interviews reveal strong negative emotional reactions to the same feature. Walk through how you would reconcile the conflicting evidence, present it to stakeholders, and recommend next steps (e.g., further research, redesign, metric changes). Include a decision framework to prioritize actions.

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