WATCH & RECORD

People are often so accustomed to certain problems in their lives that they become oblivious to them. When asked about the situations in which these latent problems occur, they frequently fail to recognize that the problems exist at all. Directly observe people’s behavior in their own environments to gain a clearer understanding of their situations.

• Immerse oneself in the needer group. Becoming a member of the group and immersing oneself in that group’s context gives designers an especially rich understanding of the group’s needs. That’s why many designs, such as bifocals, the Band-Aid, and the Post-it Note, originate from designers making products for themselves. With an intimate knowledge of the problem, the designer can make more-informed decisions about how to meet the needs he or she is trying to serve.

• Avoid intrusions to keep the behavior natural. Studying people’s activities inherently changes their behavior. Interruptions can change people’s workflow, and questions can make them reconsider their actions. In addition, people alter their behavior when they know they’re being observed, because they want make a good impression. To minimize these effects and keep customers’ behavior as natural as possible, limit intrusions into their environment and actions. Wear clothing and speak in a way that’s appropriate for the subject’s environment. Refrain from inquiring about the activities being observed until after those activities have been completed.

• Use appropriate recording media. It’s often difficult to describe something using words alone—especially when trying to record large amounts of data in a short time. Use additional recording media to capture the richness of information in the customer’s environment so that it can be further studied later. Video, audio, photos, and drawings each offer different advantages. Decide what kinds of information will be important to the study, reasonably easy to capture in the customer’s environment, and minimally intrusive to the customer’s activities. Then proceed accordingly. Video allows one to later review real-time processes in detail. Audio recording captures environmental sounds and exact wordings more inconspicuously than video. Photographs portray images of reality that can be easily categorized and sorted for comparisons. Drawings can capture details invisible to the eye, such as obscured features and object cross sections.

ASK & RECORD

Observation alone can’t tell researchers everything they want to know. Observation may offer occasional indirect indications, but generally doesn’t give clear access to people’s reasoning and emotions. To better understand these motivating factors, interview people after the observed activities have been completed to understand the context in which those activities just occurred.2 Answers to questions and further discussions can give researchers insight into why a person acted in a certain way and what he or she felt during the observed situation. This is crucial information for determining people’s needs.

• Interview in the customer’s environment. Conduct Needfinding interviews in context, while the issues are still fresh in the person’s mind. In these types of interviews, customers can walk through the process under study a second time, explaining emotions and reasoning as they go. Also, both the researcher and the customer can use relevant props in the surroundings to illustrate their points. These references to objects in the environment often trigger the customer to recognize previously latent needs.

• Record information in the customer’s terms. When documenting a discussion with a customer, record the person’s statements in his or her own words as much as possible. That person’s choice of words can carry meaning that would be lost if the researcher were to translate them. That said, though, the customer may make statements that are too general to guide design work. In such cases, use follow-up questions to get to the desired level of detail, still recording the subsequent answers in the customer’s words. Open-ended questions are especially useful for this purpose, as they give customers an opportunity to describe situations in their own words. In addition, it is often useful to have customers interpret video recordings of their own activities, explaining the motivation for their actions in their own words.

INTERPRET & REFRAME

Once data is collected, the final stage of the Needfinding process is to interpret the findings and revise the research questions. Information collected in the customer’s environment helps refine one’s understanding and prepares the team for another iteration of research. Product development can then continue in parallel to the ongoing Needfinding activity. Because Needfinding is about studying people, as well as developing products, always frame interpretations in terms of what problems need to be solved to improve the customer’s situation.

• Create need statements. Translate the information collected into statements describing customers’ needs. Although some of the information will unavoidably remain as tacit knowledge in the researchers’ heads, as much of the data as possible should be paraphrased as written need statements. The better the customer’s needs are understood and documented, the better the product developers will be able to make informed decisions in their design work.

• Classify and prioritize the needs. After the research data has been expressed as need statements, classify them by level of generality and place them into a formal hierarchy of importance. 3 This hierarchy later guides decision making during the product development process, when tradeoffs can be made according to options that serve the more important needs.

• Reframe the research. After observing and talking with a few customers, one is likely to find that the research questions should change and the needer group should be redefined. For example, after beginning a study of how touring motorcyclists use and obtain the things they need on a ride, one might find that the needer group should be sub-divided into bikers whose travel is generally limited to day trips, and those who enjoy longer journeys. Object use may differ greatly between the two groups. At the same time, new questions may emerge from the ongoing design work. The designers may find unanticipated issues that must be answered to advance the design.

Each of these four stages should be repeated to provide an increasing level of focus and detail. The process is analogous to developing a pencil sketch from a marker rendering into a solid-body model and finally a physical form. In each iteration, the activities appear quite similar. Yet each revision increases the designer’s sense of certainty as he or she moves from ambiguity to clarification.

Conclusion

Companies face constant pressure from competitors to improve their offerings. This has pushed product development organizations to optimize their processes around incremental improvement. As the traditional link between a company and its customers, marketing professionals have asked end users to articulate opportunities for immediate improvement. Design and engineering has then been chartered to make these improvements real. This approach has had notable success in industries in which linear improvements in performance—faster, smaller, cheaper, using less power, and so forth—are most desired.

However, this approach breaks down when companies seek to completely rewrite a product’s specifications or create something entirely new. While people can easily express their preferences among a set of known options, solutions that aren’t immediately apparent can go unvoiced. Companies can find that their customers express a desire for an improvement only after a competitor has created it. This forces marketing into the reactive role of asking for things that the competition already has. Developers, in turn, find themselves working toward a deadline that has already passed. When linear improvements fail to provide a decisive advantage, new opportunities must be discovered in advance.

Needfinding offers product developers a different dynamic for understanding customers, one that has a role for both marketers and designers. The methodology outlined here is a broad overview of how those involved in product development can preemptively discover opportunities for competitive advantage. Needfinding is not the exclusive territory of any one discipline; both marketers and designers need to work together to discover customers’ needs. These needs, in turn, suggest areas of innovation for designers, as well as new markets that await development. The result is a dialogue between company and customer rather than between marketing and design. In this way, both groups can work together to create innovative new solutions and leap past competitors devoted to incremental change.

Notes

1. Rolf Faste, “Perceiving Needs,” a paper for the Society of Automotive Engineers, 1988.
2. See Stanley Payne, The Art of Asking Questions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951) for a particularly useful discussion of how to phrase research questions.
3. Karl Ulrich and Steven Eppinger, in Product Design and Development, ch. 3 & 4 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), offer a rigorous method for creating and prioritizing need statements.

Related posts:

1. Direct Observation: Some Practical Advice