How to define User’s Needs Statement

Before you draw a single pixel, define what user need you’re trying to solve with your design.

Definition

An actionable problem statement used to summarise who a particular user is, the user’s need, and why the need is important to that user.

It defines what you want to solve before you move on to generating all those different ideas.

Benefits
1. You condensed your perspective on the problem
2. You provide a metric for success that you can use throughout the design thinking process.

Most Needs Statements are made up of 3 components:

User + Need + Goal

These are then combined in a somewhat equation like:

‘A user needs a way to something in order to accomplish a goal.’

Let’s breakdown the first part, A user

User should be:
- A specific persona based on your research
- Include a tagline about the user/person to remind everyone who the user is. Especially if the need statement is going to get used by a large team or stakeholders who weren’t part of the research.

Need should be:
- A real user need based on your research
- Stay away from features, interface components, specific technology, etc.

Goal:
- Result from meeting the user need
- Rooted in real empathy. Look beyond the obvious.

The fatal flaw that so many teams make is that the purpose of the User’s Needs Statement should be capturing what we want to achieve with our design and not the hows. They should help us advance our presumptive solutions from discrete specific features like buttons towards those deeper empathetic insights.

Think of it this way, User’s Needs Statement should help us frame our user’s needs as verbs, e.g. access information to learn, instead of nouns, e.g. buttons, dropdowns, etc.

When we do this we are able to generate far superior ideas because we don’t limit ourselves to those predetermined solutions which are often dressed band-aids for larger user needs.

What’s your process of User Research and how do you define the User’s Needs Statement?