In the previous chapters I emphasized the need for verifying user experience innovations, and I emphasized the need to verify your core tasks, your pain points, and your wows.

One common mistake with verification is almost finishing your design and only then verifying your solutions. In this book I have mentioned a number of methods to verify not only solutions, but also raw ideas, core tasks, causes of pain points, and so forth. It is of utmost importance that you verify at every step during your innovation process. And you will have to do this with your target users. No one else can verify for you, and if you end up on the wrong track for a solution, you may waste valuable time and resources.

The good thing is that verification is not difficult at all. The trick with verification is to verify your results from the innovation process at all stages. Verification may be less accurate at an early stage of the innovation, but it is always better to do some verification up front and get a fuzzy picture that you can refine later than to do no verification at all and head in a completely wrong direction.

For example, if you come up with a wrong cause for a serious pain point and you do not verify the cause, you may go a very long way down the innovation path before realizing this mistake. And you will not only have used a lot of time and resources designing a solution for something that the end user may not need, but you will also have missed the opportunity to solve the real cause of your pain point.

You can find a huge amount of literature and a number of articles about different methods for verifying your results and innovations, so in this chapter I will go through only the methods that I know are very effective. Depending on what you are verifying, the steps may vary slightly, but you will usually need to follow the steps described in the following sections.