Notes

How to identify user needs

Hello, my name is Karen and I’d like to share how my team and I try to identify and meet our user needs.
This is the first video in the series and it’s about identifying and understanding user needs.

So, let’s go step by step:

Identifying user needs, which is the first phase of developing the most amazing user experience, has three main points you need to address:
First: Understand and identify your target
Second: Learn where they’re at, which context they’re in and what’s their primary expectation
Third and last: Use this info to build your product or transform it.

Without further ado, I have to tell you. Our main generic approach is the simplest there could be: first of all, getting information.

Getting info is about:

First: grabbing any information that’s available: from behavioral to demographic data. This helps segment website visitors, users and customers in accordance with their preferences, age, gender, habits and more.

Having huge amounts of data and not being able to segment it doesn’t make sense, because segmentation is what helps you properly target them.
Segmentation is key in deciding what to offer to which group of people.

Second: generate information: if you lack data, generate it. Ask and learn.
Generating data is as simple as running surveys, implementing marketing campaigns, and interviewing. Even simple questions can be more informative than you think.

Generated data shall be further segmented to undergo the same process of detailed targeting.

[pause]

Nowadays technologies, social media, and tracking systems have made it incredibly easy to find, source, collect, distribute and analyze information.
The twenty-first century, in its essence, revolves around information. It’s the most accessible, yet the most precious thing now.
Having info means having it all. It’s the key to succeeding in making reasonable decisions, winning the competition, knowing what and how to target.
And it all, of course, goes around learning what users need and finding ways to meet their needs or giving a solution to their issue.

User needs are most of the time very fair and basic expectations of a certain product or service. The group of people you’re targeting wants to achieve something - get and see and use the value you’re providing.

And my biggest tip here would be:

Be in your user's shoes.
Test it. Not just like you would test your product before launching, but test it on a different project you have, on a different dimension, test like a real user would. Go through all the steps yourself. Talk anonymously to the support team, do everything your users would. And see what's missing.
Thank you all for watching, I hope this was at least somehow useful and informative. In the next video we’ll be talking about meeting user needs.
See you soon.