Defining the user’s needs and problems

User-need statements are powerful for defining and aligning on the design problem.

It has been close to a year since our team created a design process to bring clarity to our workflow. During the months of refining and iterating the process, I realized the importance of defining the scope; this is normally the first step in the design process, and the main goal is to conduct preliminary research to understand the purpose of the design.

This step is necessary in order to maximize resource use and decreases the likelihood of friction and disagreement in the prototyping, testing, and implementation stages.

Our team uses user-need statements to help us summarize who our users are, what are their needs, and why those needs are important to them. It helps us define the problem that we are solving before moving on to the ideation process. By having a clear problem statement, it also provides a metric for success throughout the entire design process.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions — Albert Einstein”

The user-need statement

The purpose of user-need statements is to have a consistent design approach throughout the entire team. It also allows us to focus our mindset on the user’s needs and problems instead of specific features.

“We should see users’ needs as verbs (that is, goals and end states) instead of nouns that describe solutions”

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The purpose of your designs shouldn’t be to create a checkout page, button, or pricing chart; it should be understanding what the user wants and providing them a solution to their needs. For example, your users don’t need a shopping cart; they need an overview of the products and the total cost in order to confirm their purchase.

The proposed features are possible solutions to the user’s needs, but it’s not necessarily the best nor the most efficient. If the purpose of your design is to create a certain feature, you’re going to be biased against other solutions which might be more optimal. This would defeat the purpose of idealization as you’re prematurely deciding on the solution.

Crafting good statements

A good user-need statement needs to have 3 components; a user, a problem or need, and an objective. These elements are combined to form the statement. The statement also needs to be human-centered and user-focused; it should not include any product specifications or business outcomes.

Below are some pointers that will help you create better problem statements:

• Human-centered: You should frame your statement according to the specific users, their needs, and the insights you gained through any prior user research.
• Keep it broad: The statement shouldn’t have any references to a specific solution or technical requirements. It’s important to keep it broad in order to develop creative freedom during the idealization phase.
• Not too generic: Although your problem statement has to be broad, it should still be able to guide you while making design decisions. It shouldn’t address multiple problems, instead, learn to prioritize.

Why is this important?

The use of a user-need statement allows you to better frame a design problem. It prioritizes the elements discussed above: the user, the problem, and their objective — promoting a human-centered design process.

“A problem well stated is half solved” — Charles Kettering

By framing the problem with a statement narrow enough to bring focus yet broad enough for creativity, the product design team can stay simultaneously focused on;

• Capturing the user’s needs
• Align the team’s vision towards a consistent goal
• Identify benchmarks for success

The next time you find it hard to align or focus on the design problem at hand, try creating a user-need statement and dive deeper into the problem. It will allow you to have a clear direction on what you have to do and make better design decisions along the way.

Credits: Jeremiah Lam[Medium.com]

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