How to understand and operate user needs?

We often say that products and operations are inseparable. Although the job responsibilities of both parties are divided differently, they are essentially both providing good user services for a product. Therefore, the core of this chapter is to discuss how to understand and operate user needs from an operational perspective.

When defining the two related hypotheses of user needs and solutions, we usually use the following method:

1. Brainstorming. Brainstorming is often a fundamental starting point for defining user pain points and solutions. Team members put themselves into the role of users, combine their own knowledge and experience, and conduct storming discussions from the perspective of empathy to define user pain points and solutions.
2. In-depth research interviews (UED). I personally believe that without in-depth interviews and participatory observations, and without turning yourself into a part of the user, the pain point hypotheses and solution hypotheses obtained are incomplete. The key is to truly contact the customer face to face and turn yourself into one of the users.
3. Learn from your competitors. That is to say, in the process of acquiring knowledge, studying the version iteration and operation history of competitors is also one of the low-cost ways to extract current user needs.

What is a pain point?

"For a product, pain points refer to unmet but widely desired needs." This answer is wrong.

If the needs are not met, users will just feel uncomfortable. The user’s discomfort cannot be used as a pain point or the entry point for the product.

Everyone will encounter such a scene:

I often receive various sales and gambling calls and text messages on my mobile phone. I wanted to uninstall the call and text message functions until I came across a certain call and text message blocking product.

When I encounter minor ailments such as headaches or fever, I always worry because I don't understand the cause; going up and down the stairs to the hospital can be exhausting. At this time, an online medical consultation app can solve my problem very well.

Some netizens also said:

I was really moved by the Head & Shoulders advertisement back then. The first time I visited my parents-in-law, my shoulders were covered with dandruff, which made the old people look disgusted; during the interview, there were white spots on my clothes, which made the interviewer frown... These were all very painful things.

Please note that in this scenario, when users are deciding what product to use to help themselves, the word they use is "fear".

The pain point is fear.

There is an article online called "How to Grasp the User Pain Points to Develop Products", which says:

Mrs. Zhang is a full-time housewife who takes care of her two children at home full-time. After getting up every morning, she has to make breakfast for her two babies first, and the eldest one goes to kindergarten after eating. Mrs. Zhang would push the stroller with the second child in it, and then hold the eldest child's hand to send the children to kindergarten.

After that, she would hurry home, coax her second child to eat, and play with him. When kindergarten is over, Mrs. Zhang has to take the second child to pick up the eldest child. When she got home, her husband was about to get off work, so she had to start preparing dinner. Mrs. Zhang also has her own interests and hobbies, her own ideas and dreams, but in fact housework has taken up all her time.

This article then analyzes Mrs. Zhang’s pain points. What this article says is wrong, so I am just giving it as an example of error.

Mrs. Zhang has no time of her own. All her time is occupied by her children. Is there a product that can solve Mrs. Zhang’s problem? This pain is not just hers, but the pain of most women who are busy with family life.

Is this a pain point? Of course not, because there is no fear.

The pain point is the handle for making a product, and another handle for making a product is the pleasure point. The cool thing is instant gratification.

What is the refreshing point?

The state when a person is satisfied is called happiness. When a person is not satisfied, he will feel uncomfortable and will start to seek. If the person can get instant gratification while seeking, the feeling is great.

It is said that when Mr. Yu Jun was recruiting a product manager at Baidu, the recruitment topic was: What should Baidu do if it wants to make music? Many people wrote lengthy plans to him, but one person only wrote six words: "Searchable and downloadable." Yu Jun chose this person, who was Li Mingyuan, who later became the vice president of Baidu.

Back then, there were very few Internet resources. People would go to Baidu to search for music and the songs they wanted to listen to. They could find them with just a search and even download them. It was so cool.

For today’s takeaway, you can place an order at home using your mobile phone and the food will be delivered to your home. If you buy daily necessities on JD.com, they can be delivered to your home within one day. It’s great to have needs met instantly.

Back to the previous scene, we know that Mrs. Zhang’s idea of ​​self-realization was not satisfied, which is of course an unhappy state. But can your service give her instant satisfaction? Can you make a product that can instantly meet the self-actualization needs of these women?

This is a complex issue and it is impossible to achieve instant gratification. It's not as simple as getting 10 points for hitting a mushroom in a game.

You see that Mrs. Zhang is unhappy, but if you don’t find a way to give her instant satisfaction, then you still haven’t found the entry point for this product.

Why? Because self-realization is actually a long and painful road, and human nature is lazy. When you see a person displaying diligence, orderliness, and self-discipline, in fact, this is because he is oppressed by a series of fears, collective personality, and subconsciousness, which makes him appear that way.

Therefore, if there is no fear of this mad dog chasing after you, no satisfaction from pleasure to keep you fed, and only an app is used to help women realize themselves, then we can bluntly say that this is a product that is neither painful nor itchy.

We have finished talking about the pain points and the pleasure points. We just talked about not feeling any pain or itchiness, now let’s talk about the itchiness.

So what is an itch point?

Pain points have become a panacea concept in today's Internet. But today, the streets are full of entrepreneurs and investors. It is not easy to make a product by just focusing on one pain point.

At this time, we have discovered a phenomenon in the past two years: various Internet celebrity products have emerged in an endless stream. For example, internet celebrity milk tea shops, boutique small cans of tea, rice, bird's nests, and internet celebrity hair dryers, are they becoming popular by grasping pain points? Obviously not, Internet celebrity products rely on itch points.

Let’s talk about a Korean drama that everyone knows, “My Love from the Star”. This is a drama from several years ago. It tells the love story between a female star and an alien. It sounds like this story has nothing new in terms of creativity, so why was it so popular at the time?

The "pain point control" concluded that this drama captured women's imagination of the combination of heroes and beautiful boys, and satisfied this pain point.

If this pain point is correct, then how is it possible to shoot 20 episodes of more than 900 minutes of content relying on just one pain point? How come we keep watching it, keep discussing it, and even make some peripheral products?

You can check out the Baidu Post Bar "You Who Came From the Stars" to see what everyone is talking about. When I went to watch it, there were over 6 million posts discussing the show.

What everyone is talking about is the professor's (the male protagonist Do Min Joon) micro-expressions, the professor's eyes, the professor's change of attitude towards 2000 (the female protagonist Cheon Song Yi), 2000's clothes, 2000's makeup and lipstick, 2000's accessories...

These are actually itchy spots. The itch point is to satisfy a person's virtual self.

What is a virtual self? It is the ideal self in your imagination.

For example, we watch idol dramas, chase stars, read online articles, and read heroic stories; we read celebrity gossip online, celebrity entrepreneurship stories, online 100,000+ Internet users, and offline full-time training courses, but you didn’t participate...

Do you really need these things to nourish you? No, the content you can't help but pay attention to is what you want to satisfy your virtual self, and it is a projection of your self-imagination.

Now let’s talk about this wave of Tik Tok and Weibo internet celebrity e-commerce.

In fact, Internet celebrities create a virtual self-life for you, which is a projection of everyone’s ideal life. When we buy things from internet celebrities, we partially realize our own virtual self.

For example, Sydney, a Weibo celebrity, said when talking about her operating experience that in order to create a better image, every time she took photos for new clothes, Sydney, who weighed only 45 kilograms, had to go on a diet a week in advance. The very "casual" street photos you see on Weibo are the products she took 10 days to shoot, and then selected and edited to operate.

Posting photos on Weibo is her most important interaction with fans. She wants to use her photos to create a life scene for her fans. She said: "What you are selling is actually a lifestyle that satisfies the beautiful fantasies in girls' hearts."

Sydney’s fans buy her outfits as a set. What they buy is not clothes, it is not based on functional needs, and it is not because they need a piece of clothing to keep warm when the weather gets cold. Instead, I want to wear the same dress that Sydney wore in Paris. By wearing Sydney's clothes, they will feel that they are partially living the life that Sydney created.

This is a kind of virtual self-realization.

summary

Pain points, pleasure points, and itch points are all good points. This depends on which aspect of the user the product and operation personnel feel most deeply and have the most accurate feel for.

For example, when you are hungry, you need to eat. But "feeling full" and "feeling satisfied" are two different concepts. Eating a steamed bun can make you full, but it only meets functional needs and is not the point that supports a good product. I had a hearty Haidilao hotpot meal and received a small gift after paying. It was a great feeling. This captures the essence of the product, and it’s a good product.

Eating too much can make you fat, which is a common fear among the public. By grasping this pain point, there is also room for product development.

Or you can also open a popular online celebrity restaurant, with an environment that is not popular, and food with special effects...

Like the Xue Pan kebabs made by Diao Ye. A user orders a portion of dry ice popcorn, eats a handful, and white dry ice steam comes out of his two ears. There is also another one that is quite popular online, where white steam comes out of his mouth after eating... Everyone finds it interesting, and everyone will take a photo and post it on WeChat Moments. This is an itchy point.

When eating a meal, you can actually create products from different entry points such as pain points, pleasure points, and itch points.

Above, we introduced the angles and dimensions of demand. Now that the demand exists, in what scenarios will users trigger this demand?

Before answering this question, let us first understand what a scene is.

We need to break down the scene: "Scene" is the concept of time and space, a scene is time plus space. Users can stay and consume in this space. If a person cannot stay and consume in a certain space, this space does not exist.

Scenery is about situations and interactions. When users stay in this space, there should be scenarios and interactions; triggering users' emotions and behaviors, and influencing users' opinions. This is the scene.

Now that we have defined our requirements and understood what the scenario is, let’s look at it together and answer seven questions for ourselves:

• First, what problem does my product solve? Is it a pain point, an itch point, or a pleasure point? Define the core needs of the product
• Second, in what kind of scenarios will users be triggered to express emotions and need to solve problems immediately? Scenario problem.
• Third, who am I solving this problem for? How long does it take for him to get instant gratification? User portrait problem
• Fourth, how many people need to solve this problem? The question of market size.
• Fifth, how do people currently solve this problem? Competitive analysis issues.
• Sixth, why can my product win in market competition? Don't simply look at the competitiveness of a single point, but look at the points, lines, surfaces and solids. Strategic planning issues
• Seventh, when the user encounters a problem, will he think of me? Marketing issues.

When it comes to user needs, many people's first reaction is that this is something that the PM should research and analyze and has nothing to do with operations. But in fact, according to the division of responsibilities, the standard process for needs should be: product manager/operation parties propose (monthly or quarterly) - team review - finally the PM is responsible for summarizing and following up.

Secondly, each operation position is essentially dealing with users. From a side perspective, operations are closer to user needs than products. For example, game operations must know which dungeons are played the most by players, which gift packages are the most attractive, and which props can boost revenue...

Another example is e-commerce operations: which single product is a hit and can be used to attract new customers, how to combine activities to increase the order rate, how can discounts increase the repurchase rate...

Now, why not follow the above method to re-examine your understanding of product needs; make a table and post it at the location; find out the user's pain points, pleasure points, and itch points... Are operations still afraid of activities, new users, activeness, paying... and users that cannot be obtained?

Source: Maoli