To make sure that you’re working on a problem that will actually help people, it’s important to fully understand your users, their behaviours - both online and offline - and their expectations. Starting with user needs is key to knowing whether you’re working on the right problem or challenge.
It’s likely you already know a lot about your audience. ‘Starting with user needs’ is a way to get everybody on a project aligned and starting with the same knowledge.
We all have different assumptions and levels of experience that we bring to a project. By gathering research on our audience (or users) and defining both who they are and what they need from us, gives us clarity. This clarity helps us make decisions on what we need to do – and crucially – what we don’t.
To help you get this clarity, you can create a knowledge board for your project. This maps out the things you know, the things you think you know, and the things you don’t know about your users or a specific challenge you’re exploring.
This will then inform what you need to find out from your users through research.
Do research with your users
To define the problems your users have, you will need to understand how they are currently using a product or service.
Start by doing research and seeing if there are common issues that crop up. With the information you learn during research you’ll start to define the problem and understand it in more depth. There’s more on how to do research in the next section.
Write a problem statement
It can be difficult to resist ‘solutionising’ straightaway so it’s important to frame things as a challenge or a problem your users are facing. To help with this, think about writing a ‘problem statement’ so that everyone in the team understands the issue. This means that you can think everything through carefully before working out how to start solving the problems.
Create a user needs statement
Even if you’re working on an existing product or service, it’s worth creating one or multiple user needs statement. Bear in mind that their needs may change over time, or you may find that something important hasn’t been addressed - so it’s important to revisit these periodically.
Starting with the needs of your users means that you help solve their actual problems, not ones you think they might have. It’s a way to be more sure that you’re spending your time doing the right things.
There are lots of ways you can do research yourself, fairly easily and quickly.
Desk research
This type of research is helpful for understanding what other similar products or services are out there. It can help to know whether there are already lots of services doing the same thing so we don’t reinvent the wheel, whether there are opportunities to innovate, or even collaborate with other organisations.
User research
You don’t need to be a trained researcher or spend loads of time or money to do decent user research that will benefit your product or service.
Spending 30-60 minutes talking to just 6 users can provide a lot of very insightful information for your project. Use your knowledge board to work out what you need to find out about, and craft your interview questions based on that.
Using simple tools like Smartsheets you can also learn about your users through surveys and questionnaires. With surveys you’ll learn more general information about your users, like how much they liked a specific interaction, but a lot less detail about them. So generally speaking it’s best to talk to your users in user research interviews to fully understand a problem.