What exercise is used to determine design requirements, user capabilities, and goals?

Needs finding is a critical exercise used in the design process to identify and clarify the design requirements, user capabilities, and goals. This approach involves engaging with potential users through interviews, surveys, observations, and other methods to gather valuable insights into their needs, preferences, and problems that require solutions. By focusing on understanding the users and their context, designers can create more effective and user-centered solutions.

This exercise allows designers to synthesize information about what users truly require from a product or service, ensuring that the final design aligns with user expectations and improves usability. In contrast, the other options, while important in the design process, serve different purposes. Feedback specifically refers to the input received from users after they have interacted with a design, which is more about evaluating a design than discovering initial needs. Researching the competition involves analyzing existing solutions in the market but does not directly focus on user needs. Mapping, on the other hand, may refer to organizing information or visualizing user journeys but is not specifically aimed at uncovering requirements and capabilities in the same comprehensive way that needs finding does.