Comments on: What Are User Needs?

By: gnva

gnva — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:17:13 +0000

Hey Fergus, my 2 cents, for what it's worth. I also get frustrated with these things, particularly when people argue over whether something is or isn't a need!

My take is that user needs are a design tool for the hypotheses that a person's life will be changed in some appreciable way by the intervention you are proposing.

There's an inherent risk that a solution is baked in and it's certainly no given that there's value for the user in any hypotheses.

However, getting hung up on the wording is a red-herring, user needs should be seen as a design tool, building on the liminal value of the user in multi-stakeholder environments. If you really want to clear things up, it's probably a "producer/consumer relationship" need, inevitably driven by the producer, but hopefully of value to and endorsed by the people who have participated in it's creation.

In this formulation, "latent needs" are just less well-developed hypotheses.

I'm not sure if this is cynical or just being clear that they're not springing untouched from some essential place that is "the user".

By: Ferg

Ferg — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:16:31 +0000

@jbaldwin has also forwarded me a response to this question from @AmyJoeFitz “User Needs are the funnel you squeeze all your ideas through to design the final product.”

This as a statement would seem to correlate with that of Murray quoted in my article. It also, following some related tweets today between @tamsina and @laurentan, confirms my sneaking suspicion that for many designer 'user needs' are something of smokescreen and can be easily manipulated by the designer.

What do you think – Do designer's genuinely seek to address “user needs” and if so what are they?

By: Graham Hill

Graham Hill — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:41:26 +0000

Hi Fergus

You are not the first one to face this problem in nomenclature. I have been scanning the literature for over 15 years looking for insights and tools to help me better understand what customers really need. I was about ready to give up when I came across Tony Ulwick and Clayton Christensen's work on customer 'jobs-to-be-done' a couple of years ago. Spurred on by what I read, I talked to Chris Lawer of Strategyn UK shortly afterwards and he explained the concept in detail.

Understanding the jobs customers are trying to get done and the outcomes they desire from doing so, really does provide a robust way to cut through the psychobabble of needs, wants, expectations, benefits, solutions and so on. It provides a simple language to understand the world from the customer's perspective, that has been missing for years. And it can be used as input into the social science instruments that we have used for years.

Take a look at Bettencourt & Ulwicks Harvard Business Review article on 'The Customer-Centred Innovation Map', Clayton Christensen's Sloan Management Review article on 'Finding the Right Job for Your Product' and Nicki Sutton's MSc thesis on 'Outcome-Driven Innovation: A Critical Review' at Cranfield Uni for more information about customer jobs-to-be-done.

Graham Hill
Customer-centric Innovator
@grahamhill

Furtther Reading:

Bettencourt & Ulwick, 'The Customer-Centred Innovation Map'
http://www.jey-associates.com/pr/Customer-Cente...

Christensen et al, 'Finding the Right Job For Your Product'
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/article...

Nicki Sutton, 'Outcome-Driven Innovation: A Critical Review'
https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/bitstream/18...