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.