A problem is an undesirable situation that a certain category of people don't want to be in or face it.
How do you understand the problem at hand?
We understand the problem by communicating with different stakeholders and understand the causes and consequences of their problems.
What are the ways of communicating with stakeholders to understand the problem?
Conduct surveys to gain valuable large scale insights
Conduct time consuming interviews to gain deeper insights from a limited audience
Observing the targeted audience regarding their practices, collaboration and communication
Leverage insights by going through research papers, books and other resources.
Are these methods enough for understanding the problem?
There is nothing like a right method for understanding problem. It all comes to how one can offer his skills to gain valuable insights in understanding the problem
How do you define your problem with the vast insights you gained from the above method?
Identify patterns in the problems described by the stakeholders
Identify the causes and consequences of the problem
Identify what aspects of the problem seem to be changeable
Use the above information to generate different forms of knowledge which helps in organizing your understanding of the problem
What are these different forms of knowledge?
Deriving goals and values from the data and represent them explicitly to understand what they are
Generate valid personas which describe different categories of people who will benefit from your design
Define scenarios on what people might attempt to do with something you design
What should we do with the knowledge obtained?
Prepare an argument that briefly explains the problem we are solving for the stakeholders