Design teams often have trouble articulating the “nuggets” they discover during empathy work. The Surprise-to-Insights leap helps teams get out of their heads and explore various interpretations of surprising user behavior.
How to make the surprise-to-insights leap
Place a few surprising observations from your empathy work on the left hand side of the board. Pick one to start and ask your team to interpret the behavior by finishing the sentence, “I wonder if this means that the user _____.” Everyone writes down their interpretation, then reads aloud (one by one), and places it on the right hand side of the board, across from the surprise.
If an interpretation sparks new ideas from the team, feel free to craft more interpretations and add them to the board. Continue the same process with the rest of your surprising observations.
Credit
design thinking bootleg by d.school at Stanford University