Define

Meeting users leaves you with fragments, and the trouble with fragments is that they don't point anywhere. When Pagedeck finished six interviews, eighty notes were stuck to the wall, and the four people looking at that wall reached four different conclusions. One said the problem was search, another said notifications, and a third said the folder structure.

Start building solutions from that state and everybody aims at a different target. Three concepts arrive four weeks later with no way to compare them against each other, and no standard for deciding which is better, because the conclusion depends on which fragments each person happens to remember.

Define is the stage where those fragments get hardened into a single sentence. It is the second of the five stages in design thinking, following empathize, and the last cell in the half of the process that's still holding onto the problem rather than the answer.

The work is grouping fragments and reducing them to one sentence. Notes go on a wall one at a time, similar ones get gathered into clusters, and the thickest cluster becomes the sentence. Eighty notes turn into seven clusters, and one of those clusters holds twenty-two of them.

The sentence carries four parts: who, in what situation, what they need, and why it doesn't work right now. "Collaboration is awkward" is not the output of this stage. Something closer to "a new joiner has to catch up on past decisions in their first week, but those decisions are scattered across ten meeting notes with no way to tell which is current" is narrow enough for the next stage to filter candidates against.

Narrow one notch too far and the solution climbs into the sentence. "There's no search" has already settled the answer, which leaves ideate with exactly one candidate to explore. The sentence goes as far as what doesn't work today and stops before what to build.

The output is a single page. The sentence written on it becomes the standard used to cut candidates in every meeting that follows, which is the only reason the page is worth making.

"What's the define sentence for this project? Reviewing mockups without it means nobody can judge them."

Nobody has agreed on what problem is being solved, so there is nothing to judge the mockups against.

"Your sentence has search in it. The solution can't go inside the problem."

Narrowing the problem tipped over into deciding the answer in advance.

"If testing showed people don't want to do the task at all, that's not a screen fix, we go back to define."

A result from a later stage sending the team back to re-examine the problem.

At Pagedeck, Noa writes this sentence and Mia reads it. When it won't narrow to one line, that means the interviews came up short, so the work goes back to the empathize stage.