Gathering User Needs (Design Course 2.5)

I've talked a lot about user needs and I've shown you some nice lists of user needs. I want to turn to the question now of exactly how we come up with those nice lists. And the method that I'm going to describe is a little bit detailed. So I'm going to switch from this video format to annotated

PowerPoint. You've heard me say before that problem definition is usefully divided into two pieces. first an articulation of the overall problem statement and then an identification of user needs. I've talked in another video about how to use the five W's method to articulate the problem statement. So here I'm going to focus on the actual mechanics of how it

is that we identify the user needs.

The the needs themselves look like this. This is a list of 50 of the 66 needs for the urban cart. The list is is presented in all of its detail, all 66 needs in chapter 3 of the design book. And for space considerations, I can only show 55 here. If you think about it, these 66 needs

are a reflection of a lot of data gathering in which the designer observes and interviews users in order to figure out what are the qualities or characteristics of the artifact that would close the gap in the user experience. Now, where do these come from and how do you identify them and how do you get

them in this form? There are five basic steps to doing this. The first is to connect with the users and I'm going to talk about two ways to do that. Observational methods and interviews. The second step is to collect the raw data based on that connection with the user. The third step is to code that data into statements of