ArticleGraphics-ForSqSpace.001.png

Framing Design Action

On design teams, we use “how might we” questions to illuminate opportunities, frame challenges, and focus our brainstorming efforts. A well-crafted "how might we" (or HMW for short) acts as a bridge between design research and design action. Let's take a look at how to craft better HMW questions to link opportunities with design directions.

 

The Anatomy of "How Might We?"

"How might we" questions have been around as a design tool since the late 1960s and recently they have gotten a lot of attention in business circles. However, most of the focus has been on the first three words of the question which set the tone for good brainstorms. In a nutshell, the HMW stem reminds us to look for possible ways to achieve a goal as a team.

ArticleGraphics-ForSqSpace.002.png

Now I want to turn our attention to the fourth word, which is usually a verb. This word has two primary functions: first, it helps emphasize what user need the team wants to address. Second, it captures how a good solution may look. In this way, it is similar to a design principle since it emphasizes an attribute that a good design might possess.

Choosing the right verbs

The best HMW questions emerge from the team’s research. We can mine our research to surface verbs to act as fodder for crafting these brainstorming stems. As an example, let’s say that we have uncovered a design opportunity for users to have actionable data that empowers them.

In that opportunity, the design team found several interlinked needs:

need to have access to their data

need to inspire action

need to remove hindrances

need to empower people to reflect on their information

need to facilitate conversations between users

Drawing on our need statements, we can pull out raw verbs for crafting HMW questions:

to access

to simplify

to inspire

to remove or mitigate

to empower or encourage

to reflect

to facilitate

With these verbs, the team can generate framing questions that link a possible design action directly with the field research. When forming the HMW questions, look for opportunities to combine these operations in inspiring and captivating ways.

HMW empower users to access their data more regularly?

HMW simplify the ritual of reflecting?

HMW inspire users to change behaviors?

HMW remove roadblocks and distractions for users?

HMW facilitate users connecting to share stories?

HMW mitigate fears around sharing personal information?

ArticleGraphics-ForSqSpace.004.png

What about if your team needs to jump into design work without research? Curating a personal list of actions to keep in your back pocket will help you be more generative when writing HMW questions.

Scoping the design stem

As we have seen so far, HMW questions follow a formula. If I were to try and write the most elemental HMW, it would be:

"HMW meet this user need?"

Breaking it apart, we get the following:

"HMW" + "meet" + "this user need?"

We covered the "HMW" stem – and "meet" acts as a placeholder for a provocative verb. What about that last part?

"This user need" calls out the specific opportunity or need we are addressing. As your team generates questions, consider the scope of the design challenge. This last part of the HMW defines the context and depth of the problem the team is trying to solve. Playing with the detail, focus, and specificity of the HMW will allow you to dial up and down the question's scope. We want to guide the HMW into a Goldilocks zone where the challenge is neither daunting (too broad), nor constrained (too narrow). As you spend time generating and brainstorming on HMW questions, you will get a better sense of where the sweet spot is for a particular design challenge.

epilogue: Opportunities as lenses that focus

After looking at how to get tactical and write better brainstorming stems, let's zoom out a little to see where they fit into our process.

As research progresses, constellations of needs condense into areas of opportunity for design. Each cluster can speak to many user needs and spark multiple HMW questions. In this way, opportunities act as lenses to focus user needs into design action.

ArticleGraphics-ForSqSpace.003.png

Opportunities encapsulate clusters of unmet needs and are the product of the team's design synthesis. As such, they have to summarize massive amounts of information from the team's research. This property makes them a bit hard to craft sometimes.

Since the design process is not linear, we can craft opportunities by working backward from HMW questions. Using our intuitions, we can go directly from user needs to HMW questions before reverse engineering areas of opportunities.

Working the opportunities from both sides helps to strengthen the link between research and ideation. Also, clustering HMW questions by their design actions (aka the VERB) becomes a powerful tool since a single design direction might meet multiple user needs or opportunities.