52 Weeks of UX have an article about ‘how to identify the best design problems‘. This dovetails very nicely with a previous article I found, about market disruption opportunities.
The best problems or opportunities all share some common behaviours:
- Are people frustrated?
- Are people actively trying to solve it?
- Are people already spending money?
As mentioned in the market disruption article, these ‘tension points’, or actions, can be seen in the form of workarounds, gaps between what consumers want and what’s actually available, people acting out of habit, and ‘shoulds vs wants’.
If you can see people demonstrating one or more of the three behaviours listed above, and their response is currently one or more of the actions listed afterwards (as opposed to the ‘do nothing’ response), then you have a perfect opportunity to make a difference.
Where the response is to ‘do nothing’, then you will have to work a bit harder to sell the benefit of what you’re proposing (try using cognitive dissonance), but the underlying frustration is still the same.