Need Finding

Why should you use this template?

Whether you are looking to discover an untapped market or develop an opportunity further, your efforts will be benefitted by putting the focus on your customer’s needs. The process of needfinding can also uncover long-unnoticed pain points that could be occurring anywhere throughout a customer’s journey.

Your product needs to succeed in the environment that your customers exist in. By asking questions centered around the need itself and the reasoning behind it, need finding allows you to see the full picture.

Direct observation and interviewing are the most common methods to collect data here, but if you are just beginning to identify your problem space, then this template is a great place to start.

Testing Outcomes

• Gain a deeper understanding of your participants’ thoughts and motivations.
• Identify and acknowledge current shortcomings or challenges.
• Replace biased assumptions about your participants with data-driven insights.

Organization Benefits

• Foster a relationship with your customers–a full series of need finding interviews could you give a detailed view of your customer needs
• Need finding is also a great for determining priority in product development

Test Questions

1. Rank these factors in order from Most Frustrating to Least Frustrating when it comes to your online shopping.
   Rank Order
   Start without any visuals and gain a general understanding of what vexes your audience the most. This rank order question will give you a baseline for where your opportunity spaces are
2. Imagine you’ve entered an online clothes shopping website. What would you typically do first?
   Multiple Choice
   Introduce participants to a page on your site and ask what actions make most sense to them on the page. You can gain an idea of where users are going next and what they expect.
3. What are you Most Likely and Least Likely to do on this page?
   MaxDiff Question
   On an action heavy page, ask participants to indicate what they are most and least likely to do. This gives you key information about what actions are most important and which are not integral to participants needs
4. What was most satisfying and what was most difficult about the experience?
   Free Response
   After getting your answers to more pointed questions, open the problem space up and give participants a chance to explain their thoughts or feelings. This should allow you to pick up on any problem spaces that you had not thought of yourself

Additional Questions

• Walk me through a typical day
• How many of your customers fall into that category?
• What were you trying to do?
• Describe your thought process
• You said you needed to do this, why?
• Could you tell me more about how that situation felt to you?
• How did you decide to do that?
• Tell me about a time that someone helped you with this.
• In what context have you used this software?
• When do you run into this issue?
• What are the essential tasks in this process?