Before writing anything I wanted to make sure I understood what a problem statement actually was and what it needed to do. I had heard the term before but I felt it was worth going back to a trusted source rather than just writing something and hoping for the best. I found an article by the Nielsen Norman Group which gave a really clear breakdown of what makes a strong problem statement and how to write one properly.
The key takeaways I got from it were that a problem statement should be concise and focused on a single problem, it should identify who is affected and how, it should communicate the impact of the problem, and crucially it should not contain a solution. The article also introduced the 5 Ws as a useful framework for gathering the right information before writing, asking who is affected, what the problem is, where and when it occurs, and why it matters. I found this particularly useful as a checklist to make sure nothing important was being left out.
With this framework in mind I felt confident enough to begin drafting.
Problem Statements in UX Discovery
Rather than writing one problem statement as a group from the start we each took a first pass at it individually. The idea behind this was that everyone would bring a slightly different angle depending on what had resonated most with them in the research, and from that we would be able to pick the strongest elements from each and combine them into something better than any one of us could have written alone.
Looking at the four drafts together it was interesting to see where we had aligned naturally and where each person had brought something slightly different to the table.
My own draft focused on the journey from incarceration to release, framing the problem around the financial burden prisoners return to and the way it undermines reintegration before it has even begun. I felt it was important to capture not just the mechanics of the problem but the human consequence of it.
Paul's draft took a similar angle but placed more emphasis on the specific types of obligations involved, direct debits, subscriptions, credit repayments, and the downstream effect on financial stability and access to essential services on release. His framing was more practical and list driven which helped give the combined version some of its specificity.
Chris pushed further into the credit damage aspect, focusing on the way missed payments lead to accounts going into default or debt collection and how poor credit then creates compounding barriers to things like housing and financial services after release. His draft made clear just how far the ripple effect of the original problem could reach.
Holly approached it from an access and support angle, focusing on the lack of tools available to prisoners to cancel their obligations and using the word avoidable to describe the resulting debt. That felt like an important word to carry into the final version. If the debt is avoidable then the absence of a solution becomes very difficult to justify.
What all four drafts had in common was a clear agreement on the core of the problem. Financial obligations continue during incarceration, prisoners cannot manage them, and the resulting debt makes reintegration harder. The differences were mostly in emphasis and framing rather than substance, which suggested we were all working from the same understanding and were well placed to combine them into something stronger.