Identifying the stakeholders and their needs should be one of your tasks. Even if you believe that you already know enough about it, either because you have been working for the company for a while, or because you have already gathered this information in another way, it is always worth revalidating it. The company's strategy may change from time to time, as well as the stakeholders' view of the product or service, which will necessarily impact your design decisions.

Remember that designing an effective user experience requires an understanding of the needs of both the business and users, and designing a solution that meets them. So far, you should understand what the business goals are for your UX project. Now, it's time to understand the project from the user's point of view.

Make sure to have listed all the problems (and symptoms) raised during your stakeholder interviews. I like to have them on post-it notes on my wall. In this way, I can group and regroup them in order to find the main issues and problems that I have to check out. You will probably notice that during the user research, you might find other problems or find out that problems listed before were actually symptoms of another problem. For example, the high cart abandonment rate might be a symptom of difficulty in finding the next...

During the stakeholder and user interviews, they might mention a few competitors. The stakeholders probably will tell you the ones they consider as competitors from a business point of view. The users might mention the same competitors and likely other ones that they consider deliver the same or similar solutions. It is a good moment to also understand how they use the competitor and why they consider it as a substitute solution, what is best and worse if compared to your product or service. The users might mention competitors that the stakeholders didn't know exist or even don't consider as a competitor. During research you might find other ones too. It is important to analyze all of them.

Analyzing the competitors, especially those mentioned by the users, will help you to understand what they are used to. To start your Comparative Competitive...

It is a fact that the more you understand the users, their needs and behavior, the easier it will be to find UX issues and know how to fix them. Understanding the user journey related to your services or products will help to better understand it, and it will help you to understand the context of users. You will gain a clear picture of where the user has come from and what they are trying to achieve. All the information you already gathered during the stakeholder and user interviews, and also CCA, will help you to come up with the user journey and its touch points. To draft the journey map, UX Mastery suggests you include:

• Personas: The main characters representing the user needs, goals, thoughts, feelings, opinions, expectations, and pain points of the user
• Timeline: A finite amount of time or variable phases
• Emotion: Frustration, anxiety, happiness...

At this point, you might have a great idea about the UX issues that you will need to fix. You should have a list of all the issues, which you can organize into groups to understand what the priorities are and the which are most urgent to be fixed. In this stage, you might not only know what the issues are, but also the consequences of them. By knowing the issues, you can come up with a problem statement.

To come up with this list of design problems, Evelina Tapia, from UXPin, suggests answering these questions:

• How do you know these are issues?
• Who is affected by these issues?
• When and how often do they occur?
• What benchmarks do you have?
• What change do you expect by fixing them?

It might be useful if you come up with a problem statement. To help you to write it, you can use the Point Of View (POV) tool, explained by Interaction Design...

In this chapter, you learned how to identify UX issues and understand the project challenges by interviewing stakeholders, using different user research methodologies, doing comparative competitor analysis, and designing user journeys and writing problem statements.

For each project, you might use a combination of different methodologies in order to find the UX issues. Although it can be interesting to plan which methods will be used to make sure that they will be accommodated into the budget, it is common to feel like you need to use other methods after each test.

In Chapter 3, Exploring Potential UX Solutions, you will not only learn how to turn findings from research into potential solutions, but also how to present the ideas for them.