Lindsey Komson

Photo by Marek Levak

As a user experience designer, the ideation phase is one of the most important in the entire design thinking process. Coming up with a solution to a user’s problem requires complex thought and several exercises. Ideation is essential in setting goals that will determine the rest of the design process, and one exercise I think is extremely important in ideation is POV statements.

What are POV statements?

A POV (point-of-view) statement is a meaningful and actionable problem statement that allows you to ideate by defining a challenge to address in ideation. According to Otayoki, the purpose of a POV statement is to  “define and formulate the right tasks so that you can solve them purposefully, where you will focus solely on the target audience, their needs, and your insights.”

In order to create a solution, we need to identify a challenge, and that’s what POV statements help us do.

How I used POV statements to assess existing apps: an exercise

If you don’t know this about me already, I love sports. If you’ve read my past blogs, I recently did an analysis of the ESPN and FOX Sports websites to share my thoughts on their design.

But for this exercise, I looked at other people’s reviews of several sports apps available on the app store to understand what they like, dislike, and think could be improved. The three aps I chose were MLB, TheScore, and CBS Sports. All three apps focus on alerting users with score updates, and some allow users to watch live sporting events. This gave me the opportunity to understand which ones users liked the most, features they thought could be included, and challenges they face while using one or more of the apps.

First, I went on the app store and read reviews for all three apps. I picked three positive, three negative, and three suggestive reviews so I could assess all different perspectives of the apps. Once I chose the reviews I’d be lookingng at, I layed them all out on a page so I could see if there were any similarities and differences. Then, I picked the biggest issues that may reviewers seemed to comment on and wrote a POV statement including the issue at hand and why it needs to be solved.

Here are my POV statements:

• MLB
  • Users who are constantly on the go need a home or lock screen widget because it will enable them to keep track of games without spending too much time navigating an app.
  • Users who might not be able to afford many streaming services need a free baseball streaming option because it will keep their fandom alive when they can’t be at the ballpark.
• TheScore
  • Users who are looking for a seamless app experience need fewer ads on each screen because they will constantly feel frustrated and inclined to delete the app.
  • Users who follow a specific team need to receive relevant notifications because they’re trusting this service to provide accurate, timely information about their team.
• CBS Sports
  • Users who want to follow their team’s live games need a seamless experience because there are other apps that provide accurate, working game feeds.
  • Users who are more casual sports fans need more information about each team available in the app because this could enable them to become hardcore fans and use the app more.

POV statements are an essential part of ideation because it shows you understand your users and allows you to develop solutions directly from their pain points. Next time you go through the design thinking process, consider creating POV statements to show that you’re able to understand users and develop solutions for those you’re designing for.