In his book Decode and Conquer, Lewis C. Lin proposes a framework - the CIRCLES method to address and develop solutions for any product design question. When applied, this framework provides a complete and thoughtful response to any design challenge. Product design questions could be anything from redesigning the interface of Instant Pot to coming up with an App that serves as a repository of your child’s health records.
The framework comprises of 7 steps which makes up the acronym CIRCLES:
C - Comprehend the Situation
I - Identify the Customer
R - Report the Customer’s needs
C - Cut, through Prioritization
L - List Solutions
E - Evaluate Trade-offs
S - Summarize Your recommendation
Comprehend the Situation
The first step of the framework begs understanding the problem with 3 W’s and H.
What is it?
Who is it for?
Why do they need it?
How does it work?
Ex: If you are asked to design an app that serves as a repository for all your child’s health records, 3 W’s and H will yield the following answers which enrich the understanding of the problem.
What is it?
The app lets you keep track of all the vaccinations administered to your child since birth.
One can record all the doctor visits, prescriptions, medications, reports and bills.
Who is it for?
Parents
Why do they need it?
New Parents who primarily do not want to miss any vaccine schedules of their newborn.
Parents who want to maintain and track their children’s health records.
How does it work?
Provision to scan/upload doctor prescriptions, bills and reports.
Growth tracking to show how your child grows compared to other children of the same age and gender.
Provision to set reminders for doctor’s visits and immunization programs.
Identify the Customer
It is important to identify a specific target customer persona, and then list their needs, goals, behaviors and demographic information. Often, a 2X2 matrix is a powerful way to visualize this.
Report the Customer’s needs
Customer’s needs and goals are communicated in the form of user stories, which use simple, everyday language.
User story template: As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>.
Here is a user story example from the health repository app: As a parent, I want to set reminders for my son’s immunization programs so that my son gets the required doses within the due date.
Cut, through prioritization
Each user story is rated (say in the scale of 1-5 with 1 being highest priority and 5 being least priority) against the following criteria:
Revenue
Customer Satisfaction
Ease of Implementation
Priority
These numbers are then added and ranked with the high priority user story bubbling to the top.
List solutions
This step entails listing all the possible solutions for the given design problem. From this pool of solutions, appropriate ones could be picked that would constitute the MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
From our running example of a health repository app, the following solutions can be listed.
Serve as a repository of vaccinations taken since birth.
To file doctor prescriptions, bills and reports.
Growth tracking to show how your child grows compared to other children of the same age and gender.
Set reminders for doctor’s visits and immunization programs.
On the profile page, users should be able to filter and sort the entries based on doctor visit, vaccine or report.
An in-built vaccine schedule as per the Indian Academy of Pediatrics with due date information.
Users should be able to scan the doctor prescription and let the app auto populate the fields in the doctor visit entry instead of manually entering information.
Users should be able to leverage speech to text conversion in adding the entries.
Evaluate tradeoffs
In this step, pros and cons of each of the solutions is listed. The criteria listed under Cut, through prioritization could be used here to evaluate the tradeoffs to arrive at the solutions that should be implemented.
Summarize your recommendation
The last step of the framework is to summarize the proposed design solution.
Describe the problem.
Explain how the proposed solution solves the problem.
Explain the rationale behind prioritizing among the listed solutions.
The CIRCLES framework gives a direction in approaching any product design question. The acronym serves as a memory aid in answering the product design questions during interviews.
