Matching user needs with new product ideas is a crucial skill for product designers. It can help you create products that solve real problems, delight your customers, and stand out from the competition. But how do you find out what your users need and how do you generate ideas that meet those needs? In this article, we will explore some methods and tips that can help you with this process.
Before you can match user needs with new product ideas, you need to understand who your users are, what they want, and what they struggle with. You can use various research methods, such as interviews, surveys, observations, or user testing, to gather insights about your target audience. You can also use tools like personas, user journeys, or empathy maps, to synthesize and visualize your findings. The goal is to identify the pain points, goals, motivations, and behaviors of your users, and to empathize with their perspectives.
I especially liked your emphasis on the importance of understanding your users' pain points, goals, motivations, and behaviors. This is essential for generating product ideas that are truly relevant and valuable to your target audience. Another important point you made is that it's important to validate your product ideas with users before investing too much time and resources into developing them. This can be done through user interviews, surveys, and prototyping. Getting feedback from users early on will help you identify any potential problems with your ideas and make necessary adjustments before it's too late.
Whenever possible conduct research with existing customers. Ethnographic research (which includes observation) will help you understand how your product can ease user pain points or obstacles, and also leads to innovations for your product that can differentiate it in the marketplace.
New product ideas are exciting. They are shiny, hopeful, and filled with possibility. They are also wrong. Every new idea is loaded with assumptions, it's an inherent part of innovation. And that's ok, so long as you acknowledge early on that iteration and feedback will be baked into how you move forward. You have to remember that you are not the only person using your product. Open-ended discovery is your friend. So is tracking your expected user journey vs. how people actually interact with the product. And at the end of the day, being able to talk to the people using your product will tell you more than anything else.
We (as designers, strategists, the sales guy down the hallway), spend too much time looking for solutions from a distance. The first thing we need to do relative to understanding our users, is to separate ourselves from the computer, and the boardroom, and the growth targets for next year.... The next thing we need to do is become a student of the product and a friend to the customer. step away from the academics and into the actions of the user. If all of your design is done from behind the screen... then you are not spending the time earning the solution... get out and play with the product, leave the office, walk up to the random people using the products and strike up a conversation.
User empathy is a highly underrated skill for product managers. Product Managers don’t build features. They build solutions to user problems!!
Once you have a clear picture of your users and their needs, you need to define the problem you want to solve for them. You can use a problem statement, a concise and specific description of the issue, to frame your challenge. A good problem statement should include the user, the need, and the context, and avoid any assumptions or solutions. For example, instead of saying "We need to make a faster app", you could say "Busy parents need a way to order groceries online in less than 10 minutes".
Scoping the problem well is a crucial step while working on a feature/idea. Always remember, you can’t build a product for everyone. Having a target market, user persona & focus pain points helps improve the impact of the idea.
A key step at this stage is also to prioritise the problems. Your research might have uncovered dozens of problems you could address, so identifying the most valuable problems will help you determine what to address first. 'Valuable' could mean different things, depending on your situation, one way to prioritise is to consider how important is a problem to how many customers.
Problem Definition involves clearly identifying the problem that needs to be solved. It's about understanding what isn't working well for the user or business. e.g, the problem could be that users find it difficult to navigate a menu, leading to frustration and reduced engagement. Once the problem is defined, the scoping objective sets the goal for what the design solution aims to achieve. It's a specific, measurable outcome. Using same e.g, the scoping objective could be to redesign the website menu to improve user navigation, leading to a 20% increase in page views and a 10% decrease in bounce rate. And the impact to the business might be increased user engagement, longer time spent on the site, and potentially higher conversion rates.
Defining a problem statement may sometimes narrow down your user base. Always try to make a separate list of edge cases from this stage itself. This will help you and save a great amount of your time and efforts, later.
I find that the tendency–especially among engineering colleagues—is to try to render problems into discrete and concrete evaluative criteria as quickly as possible: ambiguity is uncomfortable. It's a worthwhile endeavor to resist this urge to simplify, and instead spend some initial time in the fuzzy logic space of probing the unknowns, making sure you're asking the right questions before you start expending energy in search of solutions. Otherwise you end up making TV remotes and microwave control panels with buttons nobody knows how (or wants) to use.
Now that you have a well-defined problem, you can start generating ideas for possible solutions. You can use various techniques, such as brainstorming, sketching, mind mapping, or SCAMPER, to unleash your creativity and explore different options. The key is to generate as many ideas as possible, without judging or filtering them at this stage. You can also involve your users, stakeholders, or colleagues in the ideation process, to get diverse and fresh perspectives.
In my opinion, Design thinking is one of the best practice to generate ideas. It helps with 2 things - Bring fresh perspectives from cross functional team members - Create a shared understanding between all the team members
Once you understand the problem, there will be some obvious solutions. For example, if lack of information is the issue then you are looking at a product that communicates information to users (e.g. website, emails, etc). Or if the problem is that processes aren't joined up, then you are looking at a product that integrates the processes. The main thing is to keep an open mind and list all possible options. Sometimes the best option is not the most obvious one.
I might say, the worst situation is "you already know what product you will develop". However, we know this situation is everywhere. My friend did a package design project during internship, aiming at "improving food delivery experience". I remind her to pay attention to the "delivery person", because they are the people who might influence the quality of the food. Unfortunately, the client directly ask for a new package design because they believe that bad packages mess up the food. In my opinion, maybe the key is "redesigning the backpack for the delivery person". It's interesting that many companies are looking for break through innovation, but they already have expectation of outcome category.
Matching user needs with new product ideas involves empathy and creativity. Imagine a project inspired by a dog's wagging tail – a device that interprets canine emotions and communicates with owners. By connecting user needs for understanding pets, innovative ideas can emerge, emphasizing the importance of imaginative thinking in design.
Brain storm in groups, enlarge the gropus, exchange the brain storming groups & compare ! keep in focus ! ideas are inspirations too and some great ideas arise sometimes at very strange places too Observe, create & share your ideas
After you have a list of ideas, you need to evaluate them and select the most promising ones. You can use various criteria, such as feasibility, desirability, viability, or originality, to rank and compare your ideas. You can also use tools like matrices, dot voting, or SWOT analysis, to visualize and simplify your decision making. The goal is to narrow down your ideas to a few that match your user needs and your project constraints.
The simplest framework to evaluate ideas is Effort vs Impact. Companies can add more parameters and make it a weighted average matrix if they need additional parameters to prioritise.
Keep it simple. There are a lot of different ways to evaluate options, but the more complex it is, the harder it will be to pivot later if the situation changes. The goal is to clearly articulate what success means and focus on an evaluation method that can separate the best ideas from the rest. It will always be one or more people who will ultimately make the decision, so choose a method that will support those people. I have found it useful to evaluate options based on three criteria: how much impact it will have, how complex/hard it will be to make, and how well it will be received by users.
Most important thing while evaluating ideas is to make sure that the outcome you are visualising is easy to understand and use for the end user. Very often we get carried away by selecting the most promising ideas but end up complexing the actual problem we are trying to solve.
Matching user needs with new product ideas in design involves rigorous evaluation. Imagine assessing a "silent library" app idea, where users demand absolute quiet. Evaluation would reveal potential drawbacks, like user isolation, prompting the creation of sound-dampening features to cater to their needs while enhancing the user experience.
I'd like to add a note about establishing proper scope for evaluating ideas, when it comes to means of manufacture. A principle I teach in DfAM workshops (so conversations about feasibility) is the notion that desired function dictates required form and properties, which in turn dictates viable materials, which in turn dictates appropriate processes to achieve a part. Of course, there's usually LOTS of different ways to achieve a given form with sufficient properties (or even different satisfactory forms), so to have an "apples to apples" conversation on value requires looking more broadly than the typical purchasing agent's scope of marginal unit cost concern. Often the most critical work is establishing the right context of evaluation.
The final step is to prototype and test your selected ideas with your users. You can use various methods, such as wireframes, mockups, or prototypes, to create low-fidelity or high-fidelity representations of your solutions. You can also use tools like feedback forms, usability tests, or A/B tests, to collect and measure user feedback. The goal is to validate your assumptions, identify any issues or gaps, and improve your ideas based on user input.
A way to avoid any assumptions is to look at the data when you test. Users might give you certain feedback at this point but act very differently when they use the product. Ensure you have metrics to track during your prototype and test phases.
This can't be overemphasised. That's why it's an important step in the design thinking process. To effectively match user needs with product ideas, it's important to validate the possible solutions we have designed with users. It's only then users can give honest opinions on if any of the designed solutions meet their needs. Best way is to do an A/B test or multivariate design test where users are presented with different design options. To make this even more insightful, add a free text field to your design test where users can give more honest feedback that helps you improve your product ideas in relation to their needs.
It's crucial to prototype and test concepts. Imagine designing a spaceship control interface: Prototyping allows users to experience the controls virtually, ensuring they match astronaut needs precisely, avoiding costly errors in real space missions. Testing guarantees usability under extreme conditions.
It's very helpful (and humbling) to start product development projects with the awareness that you will make some bad assumptions, and that you will be wrong in some of your conclusions: therefore the sooner you find out what you're wrong about, the sooner you can 'get right'. There's no substitute for reality: not how you think a user SHOULD interact with your product, but rather how they actually do. Not how a buyer SHOULD perceive the value proposition and assess features, but how they actually do. The sooner you can 'kick the tires' on your understanding and assess the quality of your conclusions, the better.
Host focus groups to review the mock-ups and prototypes. Review feedback and refine your product for maximum engagement from the market.
The article is framed in the wrong direction - the goal isn't to match user needs with new features, but to match your product (new features, feature retirement, and enhancements) to user needs. I don't disagree with the content generally, but the goal should always be to start with end users, learn their challenges, and solve their problems.
One nugget I'd add: Always maintain a balance between user needs and tech feasibility. It's super tempting to chase the coolest, most innovative ideas, but if they don't align with what's technically achievable in our timeline or budget, we might find ourselves at a crossroads. Plus, always be open to iteration. Often, our first solution isn’t the endgame. It's a starting point that evolves with user feedback and tech advancements. Remember, design's a journey, not just a destination. Let's keep co-creating magic!
I share Timo's opinion that there are ways to increase the value of an idea, like using the Jobs to be Done framework. However, having an idea alone is not enough. It is important to begin by organizing your research to gain a better understanding of the user needs in the area that your idea pertains to and to identify the desired outcomes for the end users. These "jobs" are universal and not necessarily technical in nature.
You need to be observant, empathetic and always keep your mind open. Along with it you need to identify and analyse your target audience and trend of needs arising from them. If user connects with a simple function in the product, thats where I believe product designer have won the battle.
Additionally, don't just look at your product in isolation. You also need to consider the wider picture. Are there any similar products? What other products do your users use? What other products does your company have? What is the user doing outside of your product? Are there any regulations or standards that need to be considered? No product sits in isolation, so it is important to understand the external context and design accordingly. The product should not create separate problems for the user in other parts of their life. For example, if users already have an account with your company, then you should allow them to use that same account for your product - it gives them a better overall experience.