How to accurately explore user needs?

I wonder if you have read the story of “Buying an Electric Drill” told by Su Jie, the author of Everyone is a Product Manager:

Let’s not discuss the subjectivity and rationality of this story for now. First of all, let’s reach a point of view: when customers decide to place an order, they are not looking for a perfect product, but a product that suits them best. This sentence also applies to products. When users choose a product, they don’t want a perfect product, but a product that best suits them.

Products are just tools, and our goal is to meet customer needs and obtain expected returns by using products as a medium.

So if we want to meet user needs, we must first understand what kind of needs the users have. We need to find a way to enter the users' lives and see when they are using my products. What location? How to use it? And the feeling after using it.

When we have determined the usage scenarios in which users will perform activities, what we need to pay attention to is what problems users may encounter, which will give rise to various needs. However, not all needs are worth discussing, and we may even fall into misunderstandings without realizing it .

1. Is your problem necessarily the user’s problem?

Because we know our products too well and have seen many different types of users, we are well aware of what users’ needs will be. Therefore, when facing users, we involuntarily put ourselves in their shoes and think that this user will have similar needs like other users of the same type. Through "demand induction" , we get a "yes" or "no" answer, and finally, after retrieving the information we have stored, we can't wait to introduce the solution. This is what we often call preconceived empiricism .

Many product personnel's understanding of the product depends largely on their personal feelings and the feelings of those around them. However, this way of understanding demand is undoubtedly wrong. A few people cannot represent the ideas of the majority. The result will cause us to be confined to our own little corner, and our understanding of user needs will not lead to greater breakthroughs in our products.

We always like to use a hammer to find nails, thinking that people who have nails must need a hammer, but does that mean people who have nails must need a hammer? Just like we have discovered our so-called target users through market research, do we have to use the "hammer" solution to deal with user needs? Can I use bricks?

There is a famous law of large numbers in statistics. When the statistical data becomes larger and larger, the frequency of events will tend to a stable value, and this stable value is his expectation.

Therefore, when analyzing needs, we cannot generalize or be wishful thinking. We must step out of our own circle, understand the target user group, and talk to them about products. Only in this way can the product needs we obtain truly reflect the needs of the vast majority of users.

2. Are the demands raised by users real demands?

The demands raised by users are not necessarily their real demands. First of all, users do not have a strong product awareness and many of them have ambiguous feelings. Secondly, users are "greedy". Their direct demands are subjective, personal, and time-limited, and they tend to put forward many "selfish" demands.

In fact, users often "say one thing and do another" , "they say one thing but their bodies are very honest" . If product managers do not free themselves from these subjective consciousnesses, your product will fall into an abyss from which there is no escape.

Some demands may be low-frequency demands or even demands that violate business rules. For example, users on the Didi platform can enjoy free rides, which is something they would love to have. And if Didi meets this demand of users, it will definitely get unimaginable new additions, retention, and conversions. But will any company do it? Obviously impossible! So don’t just follow the users’ demands blindly. Irrational demand analysis is undoubtedly a suicidal act.

3. Does “need” necessarily equal demand?

In most cases, users may not know what they really want, because when describing their needs, they can only use "existing" needs to describe "invisible" needs.

Most users will only describe phenomena and problems without considering the underlying needs and motivations, which will lead us to focus only on the users' explicit needs while ignoring their real motivational needs.

If Ford had understood the superficial needs of customers at that time and thought about what kind of feed and training could make horses run faster, there would have been no cars.

In their opinion, it is impossible to make excellent products by only listening to user feedback. After all, users are not experts. They may have their own needs and expectations for a certain function of a product, but due to their lack of understanding of the product design details, their feedback may not be the best way to implement the function, nor is it sufficient to serve as a direct basis for the next step of the product.

In this simple example, the most fundamental motivation for most users' demand for Kuaima is, in the final analysis, just to reach the destination faster, and it doesn't matter what specific tools are used to achieve it.

This means that we should not simply accept users' various functional requirements and feedback, but should truly start from the user's perspective, identify true and false requirements , analyze the requirements in detail, peel off the superficial requirements, analyze through logical thinking, substitute into the user's usage scenarios, and find the deeper pain points that cause these requirements.

Finally, citing Maslow's "hierarchy of needs theory", human needs are divided into five basic needs, namely:

1. Physiological needs;

2. Demand for safety, stability and quality;

3. Sense of belonging;

4. The need to be respected;

5. The need for self-actualization

This is very helpful for us to understand user needs. After truly understanding user needs, we can provide users with the most reasonable solution from a professional perspective. This solution may not meet the needs initially raised by users, but the needs you dig deeper into.

Author: Zhugeio

Source: Zhugeio