What are the central principles of Needfinding?

Needs can be difficult to detect. Although previously undiscovered needs occasionally appear to designers by happenstance, most of us aren’t that lucky. Uncovering needs reliably requires an organized research effort. Needfinding gives designers and companies the tools necessary for illuminating needs and using them for product development. The following points characterize the philosophy behind Needfinding.

LOOK FOR NEEDS, NOT SOLUTIONS.

Looking for needs rather than specific solutions keeps all possible solutions open for consideration and avoids prematurely limiting possibilities. Needfinding researchers state needs independently of ways those needs might be served. For example, a store clerk might need to get some boxes from a high shelf. Instead of stating that the clerk needs a ladder, a Needfinding researcher would record that he needs access to boxes on the top shelf. The need leaves open possible solutions that range from using a forklift to rearranging the boxes to coming up with an entirely novel technology.

MAKE RESEARCH AND DESIGN SEAMLESS.

Needfinding researchers are often designers trained in research methods or researchers taught how to conceptualize designs. They may approach the process from a traditional marketing background. In any case, these researchers are involved in both studying people and conceptualizing new products. This approach allows for a seamless transition between research and design. The research is guided by the information necessary for product development, and the design work is conducted with a tacit understanding that could only be acquired by carrying out the research. Translation between the research and design stages of a project is greatly reduced, and both phases of the project are more effective, knowing the requirements of the other phase.

GO TO THE CUSTOMER’S ENVIRONMENT.

Researchers obtain the richest information on people’s needs by observing and interviewing customers first-hand. The researchers can then directly see many small but important details about the customer’s activities and the context in which they occur—details that wouldn’t be available outside that context. By directly observing customers’ activities, Needfinding avoids reliance on customers’ memory, descriptive ability, or awareness of a need. In addition, the customer’s environment facilitates communication between the researcher and the customer by allowing them both to refer to and use objects in the environment during the discussion.

LOOK BEYOND THE IMMEDIATELY SOLVABLE PROBLEM.

Researchers—especially designers conducting research—often don’t see beyond problems that they can immediately solve. This impediment unnecessarily limits the information gathered. To gain the full value of conducting research, Needfinding asks researchers to record and analyze issues that may seem far beyond the scope of the immediate project. Recognizing and dissecting these deeper problems allows the company to plan for issues that should be fixed down the road, even when those problems aren’t currently solvable. A scooter manufacturer, for instance, discovered that customers were annoyed by how dirty their clothes got as they rode to work. Although this couldn’t be helped in their new scooter design, they still marked the problem as an issue that could provide opportunities for long-term innovation.

LET THE CUSTOMER SET THE AGENDA.

Although researchers may go to the customer’s environment knowing what kind of information is desired, it’s important to give the customer leeway to guide activities and discussions. In Needfinding research, customers control the proceedings—at least to the extent that their activities and discussions relate to the research topic. This prevents researchers from prompting the customer on what to do next, and keeps the study open to serendipitous insights.

COLLECT ECLECTIC FORMS OF DATA.

Information about people comes in many forms. A facial expression might express a person’s emotions better than her words. Keepsakes found in an office might reveal information about a person’s relationship with his work. Needfinding researchers record all these forms of data for later study away from the site, as analyzing data in the customer’s environment distracts the researcher from collecting it. Researchers often pay special attention to contradictions between different sources of data, as these contradictions often mark unrecognized or unarticulated needs.

MAKE FINDINGS TANGIBLE AND PRESCRIPTIVE.

Written descriptions alone often don’t make the customer’s needs real to those who haven’t been involved in the research. To make decisions based on the research, the findings must be presented in a vivid and actionable form. The needs are better understood when supplemented with drawings, photos, audio recordings, and/or video. Because Needfinding leads to design, researchers also recommend what might be done to satisfy the customer’s requirements. Providing the results in a prescriptive, tangible form allows for a smoother transition between studying people’s needs and creating new ways to meet them.

ITERATE TO REFINE THE FINDINGS.

Needfinding uses many quick passes to study people, rather than one long research effort. This approach allows design work to proceed in parallel with the research. After each pass, the researchers offer a draft of the findings, outlining their current understanding of customers’ needs and contexts. Preliminary design work can then begin, based on this early hypothesis. When more information is needed to complete a design, researchers return to the field for further study. As the researcher-designers gain a better understanding of people’s needs, they also refine the products created to serve those needs.

What Is the Needfinding Process?

These principles manifest themselves as an iterative, four-stage process for studying people. They determine the approach used by researchers at every step of that process. The goals of each stage are described in general terms below, followed by descriptions of a few specific methods recommended to achieve them.

FRAME & PREPARE

At this stage, determine the research goals, the customer group being researched, and the specific sites to visit. These decisions focus the research and define a manageable scope for researchers to cover. Preparation before going to the customer’s environment helps researchers to know what questions to ask and what information to look for.

• Frame the research questions. Before beginning any research, explicitly decide on the goals of the study. Determine the three questions, for example, that the research should answer. These questions may concentrate on topics such as how objects are used in the environment, how environmental conditions affect people’s behavior, how people within the environment interact with each other, or how different types of customers might be classified. The search for answers to these questions then guides the researchers in gathering data.

• Define the needer group. Needer groups, the groups of people being studied, generally have a mainstream core, along with sub-groups of extreme users. For example, eating is about as ubiquitous an activity as one can find in humans; yet within the topic of food, there are people whose needs are fairly typical and others with rather extreme needs. School lunch providers, survivalist campers, and astronauts have needs that are unique or more pronounced than those of the mass population. Studying extreme users can highlight needs that might not be noticed from studying only the mainstream group. Yet when a solution for these extreme needs is developed, it’s often adopted by the larger group. For example, Tang was originally created as an orange juice substitute for astronauts, but mothers adopted it as a nutritious, quick breakfast drink for their children. At the same time, studying only extreme user groups can result in overbuilt product specifications, so the general populace should also be researched to get a sense of mainstream needs.

• Study established data for grounding in the subject. There’s no sense in expending resources to rediscover information that has already been published. Study publications, expert interviews, and other established sources to grasp the current level of understanding on the topic. Go to the field only when secondary sources are well understood. As well as decreasing the cost of field research, studying secondary sources also imparts a basic knowledge of the customer’s situation that helps demonstrate credibility to the needer group in later stages of Needfinding.

Related posts:

1. Direct Observation: Some Practical Advice