Step 1: Identify Paradoxes

The best paradoxes for user experience innovation are paradoxes caused by conflicting user needs, conflicting core tasks, or pain points. The reason why these elements are good for user experience innovation is that they inherently contain the user needs of the target users, and hence they will give a good chance for finding user experience innovation covering a real user need.

In this chapter, I will use a piece of video-editing software as the example product. The product is intended for nontechnical people who have a need for a simple tool to create short movies based on still photos and maybe a few video clips. The process of identifying the target users, their needs, and the core tasks has revealed the paradoxes shown in Figure 15-1.

Figure 15-1. Paradoxes for video editor software