Skills shortage toolkit

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Find or create new training courses for existing staff

Tool

User needs

User needs are a template for writing down who your users are, what situation they are in, what they need, and why.

Writing user needs before you start creating anything (from writing a paper to planning a new lesson or building some new software) helps focus your mind on what your users really need, instead of what you think they should need, or what your organisation says it needs.

The user needs formula

Ideally after you’ve done some research to find out about your users and their needs, complete the following sentences:

As a [who is your user?]
When I [what situation are they in?]
I need [what do they need?]
So that [why do they need it, what are they going to do?]

Writing good user needs

Try not to think about solutions to your users’ problems at this stage. You are only trying to capture what they need to do and why, not how. The how will come later in the design process, and it is useful to separate what and why from how.

Make sure you capture what the user is really trying to do. You can use the 5 whys tool to dig deeper into user needs. Nobody actually needs a dropdown menu on a website. They need a way to choose something. A dropdown menu is a solution, not a need.

Make as many user needs as you like. A small bit of writing for a web page might only have one user need. A whole new service or app might have a hundred or more.