Identify Customers’ Needs to Create Better Solutions
Why should I focus on people’s needs instead of their wants?
How do I start identifying my audience’s needs?
What’s the difference between external and internal needs?
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” - Henry Ford, or someone pretending to be Henry Ford.
No matter who said it, the quote drives home the idea that when you’re designing your product, you should pay attention to people’s needs versus wants. What’s the difference?
Needs stick around until they’ve been satisfied and drive people’s behavior, motivations, and the decisions they make.
Meanwhile, wants are often superficial and easily met. They’re also easy to put off or ignore completely.
Once you get in the needs headspace, you can approach your product and customers in a completely new way.
Instead of looking for quick solutions that will satisfy people’s wants, you’ll begin to understand the deeper motivations behind their behavior – which will help you relate to their lives.
This thought process can eventually lead you to find creative, innovative ways to meet people’s needs.
Let’s see how this was done by d.light, an organization that aims to improve people’s lives in the developing world.
The team at d.light traveled to Myanmar, hoping to fulfill a straightforward need: The farmers there had no access to electricity and required an energy source.
Once in the country, d.light could see firsthand how the lack of electricity affected these farmers and their families. They had to rely on expensive candles, polluting diesel, or heavy batteries that they carried to local charging stations.
The farmers also had to frequently work into the evening hours so they could earn more money, which meant they had to use these light sources often.
d.light realized that the costly, dangerous, and inconvenient lighting options were preventing farmers and their families from meeting their deeper needs: to save money, stay healthy, and keep safe.
So d.light built lighting solutions that met the farmers’ deeper needs. These cleaner, easier, and more portable light sources used new LED technology and could be powered by solar energy or at a charging station.
Just like d.light, you can identify needs by observing situations in a straightforward way, and then go deeper based on insights.
As you’re observing a situation, keep in mind that a lot of people don’t even realize what their needs are. That means you’ll have to do some careful observation to identify those needs.
So where do you start? Pay attention to how your target audience behaves. Once you start noticing their needs, list them out as nouns. Let’s try this out.
When you look at this image, you can probably think of a few things this girl might need. Here are some listed as nouns: a book, a ladder, shoes.
Let’s run with the ladder need. If you stopped your analysis here, you’d probably just make a ladder for the girl.
The ladder could be blue, it could be green, it could be made of wood or metal. But it would be a ladder, and it would help her a lot.
To go a bit deeper, you can look at the girl’s needs as verbs instead of nouns.
Here are a few verb phases that describe her needs: She needs to reach higher, she needs to read, she needs to learn.
Let’s go with “She needs to reach higher.” This opens you up to explore more innovative solutions than just a ladder. You could create stilts, a long mechanical arm, or even a jetpack for the girl.
But wait. Before you start sketching up your awesome jetpack idea, ask yourself how deep the need is.
One way to do this is to place the need along a spectrum that goes from external to internal. External is easier to see and act on, but internal is extremely valuable.
External needs are more about actions. For example, people use their mobile phones outdoors in winter and get cold hands. So someone who values non-frosty fingers invented gloves with conductive threads.
Internal needs are more about emotions. For example, people need the comfort of feeling connected to friends. So along came a tiny, rather unknown phenomenon called social media.
Yes, this process means you have to infer a lot, especially when it comes to the deeper, more internal needs. That’s why it’s important to test your theories and ideas along the way as you build out your product or service.
Let’s go back to the girl who’s reaching for a book. You could infer that she needs that book because she wants to learn more.
Why might she want to learn more? Maybe she needs to study for a test, or needs to show off to her older brother, or needs to show her mom that she doesn’t have to be babied anymore.
Running with the third example, you should now ask why she might need to prove this to her mother. The answer might be that she wants to show her independence. And voila, you’ve found the deeper need.
This deeper need can guide the way you design your product. For example, even if you’re building a simple ladder for her, knowing she needs independence will help you avoid using babylike designs or features that require help from an adult.
DO THIS NOW
Think about the ideal customer you have now (or want to have) and practice figuring out a need he or she might have.
If you’re participating in the course, go to the next section to access your self assessment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Identifying needs instead of wants can help you find more innovative solutions.
You can identify needs by viewing a situation in the most straightforward way and then go deeper.
Needs can be action-based (external) or more emotional (internal).