Conversations with clients often start like this: “We have this problem and what we need to do to fix it is this. Can you help us design it?”

But what I hear is “We think we have this problem which explains why [x] is happening in our business and we think we have an idea about how to solve it.”

Sometimes the solution has come about because a) they have some technology they’ve already invested in/want to leverage/use better/see as the next ‘big thing’ or b) it worked for some other company or c) a bright spark in their organisation knows all about the problem/solution and says it’s the answer.

For me, I’m more interested in understanding what problem [x] is, and even more importantly, what’s causing problem [x].

So my response tends to be, “What is the problem you’re trying to solve with this solution? Who does it benefit and how? Who will be using the solution? Does the problem you’re trying to solve impact them and how? Is your problem also their problem?”

What I’m looking to try to do is establish who they’re solving the problem for and whether their problem is the right problem to solve, so we can establish whether or not their solution is the right solution for the problem that needs to be solved, for whoever has the problem.

This is not always an easy or comfortable conversation to have. After all, you’re challenging your client on what they know about their business, their customers (or people/processes/systems if the problem is internal), their problem and their idea to solve it! But it is an important conversation to have because often they’re about to spend a lot of money designing and building a solution to a problem without having done due diligence to determine whether they’re investing all that time and money on the right thing.

The good news is that you can apply this approach to everything from changes to UI design to complex service design or internal business design problems, whether you’re coming in right at the start or even halfway through a project. There’s never a bad time to add value or save a client time and money.

But how do you have difficult conversations like these and help guide your client in the right direction?

In hiring me as an experience design expert, they may not have understood that they’re also hiring me as a problem detective. Companies and executives are often confused about exactly what an experience designer does. There are so many different titles and aspects to design. They may have heard about trends such as customer experience, human-centred design or design thinking, or they may have an idea of what a designer is for (they make everything look good don’t they?) or they may even have had a mandated process put on them to be more human-centred – but they often don’t really know what that means or how to do it. So they may have brought me in to do some design, assuming that meant lots of boxes and arrows or pretty pictures, or to use design to ‘fix things’. It’s my job to help them understand what I actually do and how I can help them.

The first thing is to acknowledge that the problem very well may be the right problem and that their idea to solve it may very well be the right solution. They’ve hired me as a design expert, yes – but they’re the expert in their business. So it’s important not to come charging in with a “You’re doing it all wrong! Your idea sucks! I know everything, you know nothing!” attitude. I’ve seen plenty of designers in my career start every conversation with “Well this is a mess. I can see why you need my help. We need to start all over again and do it right!” Even when it was totally unnecessary to do so. These sorts of approaches end up costing the client more time and money, increase risk and may not result in any better outcome, leading to a negative experience of designers and a lack of trust in hiring their expertise.

I tend to start by using a chicken analogy. Imagine your idea as a baby chick, all yellow and fluffy and cute and full of potential, sitting in your hand. We want to make sure that baby chick can grow and develop the way it needs to, to reach maturity and be the best it can be. So we need to hold it gently and not too tightly to allow it to grow and develop; if we hold onto it too tightly, we’ll stifle its growth and limit its potential. We may even kill it. Conversely, we don’t want to drop it either – letting go of it completely will also kill the chick and we’ll never know what its potential could have been. So just hold it safely in your hands and let’s see what it grows into. You never know – it may not grow up to be a chicken; it may turn out to be a swan.

The next step is for me to do due diligence on my part. The important thing to realise is that at this stage, everything to do with the problem or potential solution is based on opinion and assumption – not facts. The first thing I do is develop a set of hypotheses based on these assumptions to test and validate throughout the following process. It’s these hypotheses that help me determine whether their problem is the right problem to solve and whether their proposed solution is the right solution to solve that problem.

I start by finding out if the client has already done any research into the problem – maybe they already have data or analytics. Perhaps they’ve done customer research in the past. They may have already done user testing on existing products or services. Some companies have a very good picture of who their customers are and what their needs and pain points are. Others have only some of the picture – they may know for example what customers are doing but not why. Others may only have a very vague awareness of who their customers are or whether there are any issues there. And yet others have no idea at all.

There may be industry reports or consumer research papers that can help me to gather some key insights or trends to help assess the problem/solution and frame direction and guidance for the client. It’s a good idea to undertake an expert review and evaluation of the existing product or service (if there is one) to understand the problem as they’ve explained it and see whether or not my opinion aligns with theirs.

Once I’ve gathered what I can, I work with the client to conduct a landscape review – this separates the facts that are known from the assumptions that are unknown – and highlights the questions that need to be asked to determine what the right problem to be solved is. It allows us to objectively review the original problem and proposed solution and assess whether they are still the right direction or not. This is often an important step – and sometimes an “uh huh” moment in understanding what the problem really is.

Now that I have my clients attention and have shown the value in what I do, we can open the conversation to discuss what to do next in determining what the right problem is and how to solve it the right way for the right customer, to ensure the project is set up for success from the start.