Chapter 08

Reframing stage

08

Overview of reframing stage

person
Bistra Job title
person
Mouna

We’ve arrived at the Reframing Stage! This stage is one of the most exciting yet challenging parts of the process.

Reframing aims to avoid problem-solving in a linear manner, meaning, it doesn’t expect that we can easily move from problem to solution. This linear approach is less effective in situations as complex as ours – situations with diverse stakeholders, systems and processes at play. It acknowledges that it’s unrealistic that we’d arrive at solutions so quickly.

Instead, reframing encourages us to come up with break-through ideas by zooming out and absorbing as much data as possible in order to capture the larger context of the problem. It frees our minds to think more creatively and puts us in the shoes of the people at the center of the problem.

In practical terms, we start reframing by taking a step back and examining what we’ve learned so far. We proceed by reminding ourselves of peoples’ frustrations, insights and opportunities. Then, we use these data points to distill the themes that participants decide are most prominent. Finally, from these emerging themes, we create new challenge statements. Activities such as ‘How Might We…’ statements, ‘Choose A Focus’ and vision statements, outlined in the pages that follow, will help us along the way. In the end, the goal of reframing is to ensure that the initial problem is still relevant after all that we’ve learned.

Throughout the Reframing Stage, it’s important to remember to be open to leaps that feel right and make sense to you, your team and participants. Also, don’t forget to ensure that everyone has looked at the problem from the perspective of the people most affected by it.

Experiences from the field

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REVIEW DATA, IDENTIFY KEY THEMES

In this activity you want to review all the work you have done in the planning Empathy and Sensemaking stages so far and find the most prominent and important themes.

We will be using the a new affinity map to help make sense of the big amount of data that we have.

OUTPUTS: the most important themes from your research in the Empathy and Sensemaking stages, that you will use at the Reframe stage.

WHAT IS A THEME

Findings and insights that have similar characteristics.

The more similar insights the more important the theme is.

The themes should capture:

  • the main problems or pain points that the people you are creating solutions with experience; what they think and feel, what are their needs; and
  • opportunities / alternative solutions to address the challenge

You should include any of the surprising comments or patterns that emerged from your research.

EXAMPLES OF THEMES

  • several people in our interviews may have said that they were experiencing falls in funding due to funds being redirected for COVID programmes
  • many people are turning to crowdfunding but have seen limited success in their first campaigns because of a lack of public familiarity with crowdfunding

HOW THIS WORKS

We are going to create a new affinity map.

We’ll work in our research teams and then as the whole group, as we review the tools we’ve used in Empathy and Sensemaking. We could look at everything we’ve done so far, but for this exercise we will choose:

  • Personas & empathy maps
  • Affinity maps

 NEW CHALLENGE STATEMENTS

The reframe stage looks again at our original challenge. The goal is to update the challenge statement so that it is still relevant after all you have learned.

We have identified our persona’s pain points and opportunities, and identified some of the main themes that could solve the challenge.

Now we create new challenge statements based on these insights and themes. We will use these to inspire the Ideation stage.

MINDSET

Be open to intuitive leaps and ensure that the teams have discovered new perspectives and looked at the problem from the users point of view.

This activity helps you translate your insights and vision into a series of reframed design challenge statements.

OUTPUTS

We will create several How Might We (HMW) statements that we will then choose from. We will take one as the starting point for the ideation stage.

HOW DOES IT WORK

This step requires you to carefully craft statements that express both the opportunities of your vision statements, and resolve the experience issues identified in your insights.

Creating HMW statements requires patience and practice.

We want statements that are broad enough to allow for many creative solutions, but not so broad that you will feel like you do not have enough focus and key insight to get a good solution.

We have several themes and may address different themes in different HMW questions.

An example……….

Tools for reframing stage

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person
Jonathan Job title
person
Bistra Job title

‘How might we’ statements (p. 77-78)
Choose a focus (p. 79)
Vision statement (p.80)

Best practices

person
Deepta Job title
person
Fred Job title

What if we do parts online and offline?

person
Pang Job title
person
Deepta Job title

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