Finding solutions

The best thing of having all your user research findings documented and organized in a report is that now you can better analyze them and start thinking about the solutions on how to fix the main UX issues. It is important that you have on this same report the recommendations, potential solutions to explore, and suggestions for the next steps.

You now have a list of specific UX issues that you have identified and organized in priorities. Start drafting solutions for the highest priorities. It is common that the users interviewed during the research have given you hints for solutions. You might have heard from them "this feature could be like that tool". All these ideas raised during the user interviews and usability tests sessions should be sketched and tested. 

For some issues, you might not have even had them verbalized by the users. In this case, you can do benchmarking to get inspired by other tools and solutions. You will want to start analyzing the tools and software mentioned by the users during the user interview or surveys. It is important to understand which other players your users are used to. Keep the solution simple and do not reinvent the wheel to help you to fix UX issues and improve the user experience. 

If you already have practical design solutions to be tested you can draft the first ideas. If you still don't feel like you have the potential solutions to the issues you have identified, you can organize internal design workshops. The idea is to find different perspectives on potential solutions to the issues you have identified, based on the user needs (you should use the personas created before here).

For the workshops, it is important to have the problem statement very clear and the issues listed to be shared with the group. You will want to keep the focus on these issues; for this, you can have them visibly printed and pasted on the wall, for example, or on the screen. It is also nice to have copies of your report/findings, which you should present at the beginning of the session.

The workshop to address design problems could be handled in several ways – storyboarding solutions, drawing and discussing mock-ups, and brainstorming. But the goal is to agree on problems you're trying to solve and come up with possible solutions to solve them.

Another way to have some good ideas to design solutions is to do some good benchmarking. You can start focusing on one specific part of the design or functionality. For example, if you found issues with the forms or flow of it, you can focus your benchmarking on this. Try to find the best solutions for specific issues during your benchmarking and don't limit your research to the same field of your client, you can find good ideas from different kinds of website and/or apps; what is important here is: the more references of good practices you have, the easier it will be for you to come up with potential solutions. Also, it is a good idea to review your competitors and doing Competitive Task Analysis for the specific issues you have found.