It can be easy to limit your thinking and embed solutions in your HMW questions. But doing so restricts the pool of possibilities, and fewer ideas are generated. In the example below, the first HMW suggests a particular type of solution, whereas the second is agnostic about any particular solutio...

Spend time with your team writing and selecting your HMWs before you begin ideating. You can have everyone contribute an HMW; then go through the following checklist to select or improve the best version:

• Is it based on an existing problem or insight?
• Does it track the desir...

Stating your HMW questions positively can generate more ideas and also encourage creativity.

If you find yourself using negative verbs like ‘reduce,’ ‘remove,’ ‘prevent,’ ask yourself if you can frame things more positively by using positive action verbs, like ‘increase,’ ‘create,’ ‘en...

In our course on discoveries at our UX Conference, we talk about the importance of solving the right problem. Discovery research commonly results in learning about the problem space. This knowledge should be used to generate solutions that solve real user problems.

Ideally, the team should...

To avoid solving symptoms of the problems rather than the root problems themselves, ask yourself whether your HMW question focuses on the desired outcome. In the example below, the first HMW question loses sight of what we really want to achieve.

• Problem: Users often call us because ...

When writing HMW questions, ask yourself if you could rewrite them in a broader way? The broader the HMW, the more ideas can be generated.

• Insight: Users often spend a long time checking their submission for mistakes.
• HMW (good): How might we make it quick and easy for users...