creatures, but that’s for a different book.
Many products are developed based on a hunch, a judgment call, incomplete information, or faith-based hallucinations. Only after they fail miserably do developers ask themselves why. In most cases, the answer is that the product does not meet a real user need or solve a problem people really care about. This chapter walks you through one straightforward technique for uncovering user needs, answering that vital question “What do people need?”
Why Is This Question Important?
“What do people need?” is a critical question to ask when you build products. Wasting your life’s savings and your investors’ money, risking your reputation, making false promises to employees and potential partners, and trashing months of work you can never get back is a shame. It’s also a shame to find out you were completely delusional when you thought that everyone needed the product you were working on.
The question is important because of the risk it entails. Many product development teams tend to ask themselves if they can build a product. The answer in most cases is, yes they can. When you realize the importance of first finding out what humans need, then you start asking yourself if you should build a product, rather than if you can.
When Should You Ask the Question?
“What do people need?” is probably the most important question a product development team will ask itself. Ninety-five percent of founders and product managers interviewed for this book did ask themselves this question. The timing of asking (or rather answering) this question is key because although needs are relatively stable, it’s worth being aware that users may not need “it” (whatever “it” may be) in six months’ time. The market might also affect needs—for example, legislation changes, entrance of other products to the market, etc.
That said, there are two great times to ask the question: somewhere in the beginning of strategizing your product, and after launching it during the assessment phase (see Figure 1.1).
• When you strategize, you try to figure out a lot of things about the need for your product, who your target audience is, and what your audience wants. Attaining this knowledge and wisdom will serve you well during the execution phase. Discovering user needs will help you figure out how the product should be built, because it will generate evidence, validation, and invalidation for various product features.
• During the assessment phase, your users use the product, and you can learn whether or not your product meets their real needs. Beware though. If this is the first time you study your audience’s needs, you might find and learn things that will be very hard and costly to fix. The best time to answer the question is prior to execution. However, it is never too late or an inappropriate time to ask the question. The sooner you realize you need an evidence-based answer, the better.
FIGURE 1.1 When is a good time to ask “What do people need?” The big circle represents the best time, while the smaller ones indicate other times recommended for asking the question.
Answering the Question with Experience Sampling
Experience sampling is a strategic research technique that answers a high-level business (or roadmap) question rather than evaluating a design or product that already exists. Experience sampling is good for uncovering unmet needs, which will lead to generating great ideas for new products and for validating (or invalidating) ideas you already have.
In an experience sampling study, research participants are interrupted several times a day or week to note their experience in real time. The idea is based on what was called a pager study in the 1950s. The essence of the 1950s version of experience sampling was the use of pagers or other signaling devices to trigger involvement in the research study.
The key to experience sampling is asking the same question over and over again at random times during the day or week. This cadence and repetition strengthens your finding’s validity and allows you to identify patterns, like participants reporting greater satisfaction right after completing certain tasks. For example, you might ask people what annoyed them recently. Imagine if you ask that question five times a day for a period of five days and 100 people participate in your research. This means you will potentially collect 2,500 data points. That can be turned into a large, useful body of knowledge.
Why Experience Sampling Works
Experience sampling is an effective user research technique that has the following benefits:
• Offers insights about user needs: It gives you a glimpse into users’ lives and their realities and uncovers their objective needs.
• Provides evidence-based feature generation: The results can be transformed easily into product features because they provide a combination of qualitative and quantitative data about very specific needs. This way, you can become confident in your innovation since it is backed by evidence.
• Highlights current pain points and delights: When you learn what makes your potential customers happy or angry, you are one step closer to offering a product or service that meets their needs.
• Gives inspiration for new ideas: Your viewpoint about your product idea might be narrow, and you wouldn’t even know it. It uncovers other viewpoints, or categories, of a topic you might not be aware of. These help you come up with better products or services.
Other Questions Experience Sampling Helps Answer
Other than the “What do people need?” question, experience sampling is a great method for answering the following questions as well. If you ask yourself (not users) any one of these questions, experience sampling is a technique that can help you get an answer.
• Would people be willing to pay to use the product?
• How do we make using this product a habit?
Clarification: The worst way to know if people would pay to use a product or if they would use it repeatedly is ask them directly. Humans are very bad at predicting their future behavior. In experience sampling, you explore people’s current behavior, which is the best predictor of future behavior. You won’t know for sure if they’ll pay for your product or make a habit of using it. But if you ask the right experience sampling question (see Step 1 later in the chapter), you will know what they currently pay for, how they currently behave, and how painful certain needs are for them. These will give you strong insights and indications of whether they might pay for a product or make a habit of using it. You are not going to be 100% sure because there are many other factors at play here (price point, marketing, timing of product release, and many more), but you will have a greater understanding of a need.
• Is there a need for the product?
Experience sampling is not a way to evaluate product design. It is, however, helpful in evaluating whether or not there’s a need for a specific product you have in mind (or at hand). The key is to explore people’s current behavior without your product and evaluate whether or not they indicate a need that