Needs: Met and Unmet
What exactly are user needs?
“Figure out the user needs.” This is a not-uncommon quest among product folks, experience designers, and developers. It is meant to telegraph an org’s requirement to understand how it can serve a market, or support a community. But what are “needs,” exactly?
Often I hear “user needs” described as parts of a solution. I also hear them described as outcomes or goals that people want to achieve. The way teams use the phrase varies enough that I bet it causes a new employee extra time to get used to a different definition than where they had been working before.
It wasn’t until last year that I finally found a definition that maps to what I do with strategic research in Data Science That Listens.
More Structured & Recognizable
In the method that I created, we don’t search for needs at all. Partly it’s because that phrase about “user needs” didn’t exist when I started creating the method, but also it’s because “needs” are not clearly defined. I was working closely with developers and business leaders, so I needed something that was more structured and recognizable. Something more like engineering, but to describe complex, nonlinear, and sometimes illogical human thinking. I also needed something that was measurable. But truly human.
So in my method we search for people’s inner thinking, emotional reactions, and personal rules. We learn to recognize and use opinions and explanations to help a person unfold what was going through their mind back at a particular moment. Because it’s strategic research, not tactical, we frame our studies by people’s intent, not by our solution. And we help patterns emerge across people’s thinking — patterns that we never thought of before. The result is a mostly-bias-free visualization of people’s approaches to their intent.
Needs: Defined by Center for Nonviolent Communication
Last year I met Marie Miyashiro, who has been running workshops in collaboration with the Center for Nonviolent Communication for decades. She helps businesses focus on empathy and emotions. She teaches that people need to be empowered or understood. Emotions arise when these needs are met or unmet.
For example, a team member may be trying to get promoted, but has been passed over a couple of times. Promotion, to them, stands for more money, but more importantly, for people to pay attention to their ideas. To date, managers and teammates have consistently rejected their ideas. So emotions of frustration, determination, and even self-doubt have been ruling this person’s mind.
Emotional Reactions: Defined in Data Science That Listens
In my Emergent Data Synthesis course I teach people how to recognize the three types of concepts to use from a transcript: inner thinking, emotional reactions, and personal rules. Finding the emotional reactions are sometimes the trickiest. They are not simply an emotional word that a person uses — instead emotional reactions are the actual feeling coursing through the neurons at a particular moment back in time. So a sentence like “I’m happiest when I am looking forward to trying a new restaurant” is a preference, not an emotional reaction. An emotional reaction would be “Last Friday my friend finally agreed to try the Peruvian restaurant with me that night, which totally made me excited the rest of that afternoon. I kept smiling in anticipation of new flavors I might encounter.”
In my lessons about recognizing emotional reactions, I explain four conditions you might find.
1. Emotions that are clearly conveyed. (“Feel excited about trying new flavors tonight.” Easy, yay!)
2. Implied emotions: finding the emotion the person meant to communicate. (This is more difficult. Use emotion words they used earlier, or try to brainstorm some emotion words. If you’re fairly sure this is the emotional reaction they meant to communicate, use it in the data synthesis. But if you’re not, maybe skip using this item. It’s fraught with cognitive bias danger.)
3. Non-emotions, which are usually opinions prefaced with the words “I feel.” (“I feel that,” “I feel as if,” “I feel I deserve.” Look later in the transcript to see if the person goes into the cognition behind the opinion. Hopefully the listener helped them unfold it.)
4. Emotions that describe a relationship between two people. (“I feel ignored,” “I feel misunderstood.” While we might describe ourselves as having these emotions, in psychology they point out that it’s reflective: the other person is doing the ignoring or misunderstanding. The other person is the one who must change for the emotion to resolve. A more true emotion is one that the person feels without the other person in the picture, an emotion they can change themself. In a listening session, a listener will recognize the #4 condition, and will help the person unfold their actual emotional reactions that arose as a result.)
🤯 When I heard Marie Miyashiro say, “need to be understood,” that reminded me of this fourth condition. What #4 describes is what she means by “needs.” And then actual emotional reactions will arise from these types of relationship emotions being met or unmet.
The Definition of User Needs
“User needs” is the #4 condition of emotional reactions. It’s just that one thing: emotions about the relationship between people.
On the other hand … I see “user needs” used to imply other things. The phrase is being recast as something other than what it really means.
- “User needs” cast as the outcome people are after might be more clearly described as their intention, goal, or larger purpose.
- “User needs” cast as part of the solution is simply looking at people through your org’s eyes, which is limiting. I often call this the “lens of the solution.”
Knowing the actual emotional reactions, inner thinking, and personal rules provides more powerful understanding of the patterns across people. These three interior cognition concept types allow your team to see new patterns across groups, to recognize who is missing from your efforts, and to innovate in ways that follow people’s cognition rather than your competition’s footsteps. It allows complex human cognition to be structured yet human, so you can measure, using tactical research, how well your solutions support people’s cognition.
Notes:
- Indi & Jess made an “I Spy” of the ideas in Data Science that Listens.
2. Marie Miyashiro’s book is The Empathy Factor.
3. Marie Miyashiro’s talk from January 2024 is among the following set of 10 minute presentations from the Empathy Summit, organized by Edwin Rutsch and Anita Nowak. https://youtu.be/dQtN0J0yUQ8
