We understand user needs by focusing on people’s goals rather than their preferences when doing user research. Goals are the things that they should fulfill. Preferences are things users want or like, such as the style of a website or the color of it.

People frequently believe they are visiting a website to interact with it, when in fact they are visiting to use a service.

People engage with services rather than webpages. When our digital offerings are easy and inexpensive, they use them.

For defining and aligning on the design problem, user-need statements are really valuable.

The user-need statement

The purpose of user-need statements is to ensure that everyone in the team is using the same design approach. It also helps us to concentrate our thoughts on the requirements and problems of users rather than specific features.

Users, for example, don’t need another food delivery platform; they just need a way to look for food in their area and have it delivered whenever they want.

The goal of your designs should not be to build a checkout page, button, or pricing table; instead, it should be to understand the user’s demands and provide a solution.

Your users, for example, do not require a shopping cart; instead, they require an overview of the products and the total cost in order to finalize their purchase.

How to know about the user needs

The following actions can help you learn more about users and their needs:

• interviewing and watching current or potential users of the product
• speaking with professionals who work with actual or potential users
• analyzing available data

How to write

Write out your users’ needs once you have a strong knowledge of their requirements. You may then include them in your user descriptions.

• what should the user like doing?
• why should the user want to use it?

You can also include:

• What kind of user has this requirement?
• what prompts the user’s request?
• Is the user constrained in any way?

Write user needs from the user’s point of view. Use words that people are familiar with and would use themselves.

Makes a good problem statement

A user, a need/pain point, and a goal/reason should all be included in a problem statement. It’s a simple formula to remember, and it’s become a popular beginning point for design projects.

However, as designing meaningful problem statements, we must first guarantee that we already have a deep understanding of the problem and user needs.

I often see lists of statements that are either too precise, driven mostly by technical requirements, or too high-level, driven primarily by profit goals.

You’ll need to do more than just make a list of user requirements to come up with relevant problem statements.

1. Create a broad statement for your project.
2. Collect data to support your problem statement.
3. Replace secondary problem statements for your insights.
4. Link your problem statements to relevant feature ideas.
5. Make success criteria that can be tested.

Summary

Defining user needs is a time-consuming and its importance in product development, however, cannot be underestimated. It is impossible to create a product that will be valuable to users and thus financially successful without doing a comprehensive user needs analysis.

The more you know about your users, the more likely you are to create and build a solution that fits their needs.