Why is it important to identify user needs?
Jas Nijhar, Specialist User Researcher in BT Design blogs about how a new approach to identifying and acting on user needs was established and rolled out across BT Design.
At BT Consumer Digital, understanding our users is the heart of everything we do, whether you are a designer, researcher or product manager.
We believe that products and services designed around users and their needs are more likely to be useful for customers and successful for the business — so writing user need statements is an essential step when building a new product, feature or service.
It’s actually the very first step in our “Build, Measure, Learn” process (see screenshots below).
It’s also the best way to align everyone on the problem that needs to be solved. Doing the right thing for our customers is one of our 4 key design principles in BT Consumer Digital, which are:
- Puts me first
- Daringly simple
- Knows me
- Reassures me
Making sure user needs are used correctly
We noticed that squads were not always writing user needs correctly, and often not using evidence from research.
Instead they were relying on assumptions. With this in mind, fellow User Researcher Arthur Chan and myself decided to create some User Research artefacts to help squads when trying to write user needs.
We began by creating a “User Needs Guide” within our shared space on Notion, aimed at anyone within BT Consumer Digital who is interested in writing user needs. The guide explained how to identify and validate user needs through research, and how to write user needs with good and bad examples.
We then created a “Bank of User Needs” — a spreadsheet to store and share all the user needs that have been identified from research.
The “User Needs Guide” included a link to this spreadsheet, with instructions for how to go about filling it up.
The spreadsheet had multiple columns for each user need:
- User Goal — what’s the over-arching user goal that this user need fits under?
- Customer Type — who is the user?
- Segment — do they belong to a particular segment or persona?
- User Need — what does the user need/want to do and why?
- Importance — based on the evidence, how important is this user need?
- Confidence level — based on the evidence, how confident do you feel about this user need?
- Source — where can we find evidence of this user need?
Arthur and I then trialled these new artefacts with our respective tribes, using the guide to help us fill in the “Bank of User Needs” spreadsheet.
We approached this in slightly different ways.
Within my tribe we already had identified lots of user needs from past generative research, but it was spread out across lots of different research reports.
So, working closely with our Service Designer Slavka Bozhinova, we recruited some volunteers within our tribe (product designers and content designers) and we each took a specific user goal (e.g. Get Broadband, Get TV, Upgrade broadband, Upgrade TV), and went through past user research reports (in our research repository on Notion) for that specific user goal. We extracted the user needs and added them into the spreadsheet.
As the tribe user researcher, I went through and reviewed all the user needs that had been added, to make sure they were in the correct format and added the importance and confidence levels.
Within Arthur’s tribe, they conducted a series of workshops with individual squads and got all the designers to write user needs (in Mural) according to the guide, using any available research and insights that was available. Arthur and User Researcher Ellie Cowley then refined the list of user needs, and transferred them into the spreadsheet.
We scaled up our work by getting the rest of the user researchers involved.
We walking them through the artefacts (guide and spreadsheet), explaining our process for populating the spreadsheet and encouraging them to do the same for their respective tribes.
Within the spreadsheet, we created different tabs for each tribe. Tribe researchers would then own their respective area by populating and regularly updating it with user needs they’d identified.
We’re now seeing many squads across the BT Consumer Digital use this spreadsheet as a starting point to find primary/secondary/teritary user needs when kicking off a new project.
If they aren’t able to find any relevant user needs in the spreadsheet, or want to further validate what they have found, they now know they can work with their tribe researcher to conduct new discovery/generative research.
Any new or reinforced user needs found can then populate the spreadsheet, and the cycle continues.
We truly believe that designing new experiences around users and their needs is more likely to be useful for customers and successful for the business.
If you’re a User Researcher who loves putting users at the heart of their work, come and join the research team at BT!
