Research the Problem

Now it's time to go deeper into the problem. 0:00 I started this section by including research about the target audience. 0:04 Here is the student persona, and here is the empathy map. 0:08 You can include other research artifacts here, such as survey responses, 0:14 user testing, feedback, and analytics insights. 0:19 You can also include industry research and 0:24 a competitive analysis of other companies who are doing something similar. 0:26 Then I started documenting the current experience, beginning with the user flow. 0:31 The prospective apprentice visits the landing page and submits an interest form. 0:37 The data is emailed to Treehouse. 0:42 Then, someone on the Treehouse staff manually creates the account and 0:45 assigns their access to the organization and the starter learning track. 0:49 This tedious process is a major pain point, and 0:54 the user flow is a simple way to make that apparent. 0:58 Once given access, the user receives an invitation email. 1:01 Then they can sign up for a Treehouse account and 1:05 see the track on their dashboard when they sign in. 1:07 Then I included screenshots of the current experience. 1:11 Starting with the landing page, I included pain points for each. 1:14 You can see I followed this format for the interest form and email. 1:18 For each point, I pointed out areas for improvement. 1:26 As you can see, the invitation email has room for improvement. 1:30 It doesn't mention the apprenticeship program, and it's no wonder that 1:34 prospective apprentices often either overlook this email or get confused by it. 1:38 Great, so at this point the audience has all the backstory and 1:43 is aware of the current state. 1:47 Next, I'll present my ideas for solving the problem. 1:49