Learn more about goal statements

It’s time to merge the insights from empathy maps, personas, user stories, and user journey maps to come up with a focused scope for your designs. You’ll transition from the problem the user is facing to the solution we can create as UX designers. To focus the scope of your designs, you’ll create a goal statement.

A goal statement is one or two sentences that describe a product and its benefits for the user. In other words, the goal statement provides the ideal solution for your design challenge. Goal statements cover who the product will serve, what the product will do, and why the product solves the user’s need.

Let’s explore how you can create a goal statement for your own design project.

1. Revisit your problem statement.

You need to understand the problem that users are facing before you can design a solution to address that problem. As a reminder, here is the template you can use to create a problem statement:

[User name] is a/an [user characteristics] who needs [user need] because [insight].

Here’s an example of a problem statement from earlier in the certificate program that you might remember:

Sawyer is a construction business owner who needs to attend local trade conferences because they need to network to find more clients.

If you didn’t create a problem statement, you can still get the answers you need to create a goal statement. You can pull the who, what and why into your goal statement from various other parts of your research and work to date. You can find the who using the information from your persona. The user story can provide the what. And the empathy map and user journey maps will help you answer the why.

2. Transition from identifying the problem to defining the goal.

At this point, it’s time to transition from the problem that users are facing to the solution we can design to meet their needs. This can be a single, specific goal or a greater idea that you’ve chosen to be the focus of your design.

Remember, the goal statement should be just one or two sentences that describes the product and its benefits for the user. Your goal statement needs to address the problem that you identified earlier in the problem statement. A strong goal statement:

• Describes a specific action users can take or what the product will do.
• Defines who the action will affect.
• States the positive impact of the action or why the product solves the user’s need.
• Outlines success in measurable terms.

To create a goal statement, you can fill in this template:

Our [product] will let users [perform specific actions] which will affect [describe who the action will affect] by [describe how the action will positively affect them]. We will measure effectiveness by [describe how you will measure the impact].

Using this template, we can quickly write a goal statement that addresses the user problem identified in the problem statement above:

Our TradeConference app will let users expand their business which will affect how business owners connect with new clients by giving them the ability to connect with clients at local trade shows. We will measure effectiveness by analyzing show attendance.

That’s it! You now know how to create a great goal statement. With a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to write goal statements that confidently guide the product development process.

Sources: Google UX Design Professional Certificate

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