g1sh - Guillermo Torres

Creating user needs

I work at a digital marketing/advertising agency and the time when I see the most contrast is at the beginning of a project when I am defining user needs. More often than not, I find myself with little to none user needs and a some user wants. In addition to that the type of project calls for the “creation” of user needs. It’s advertisement after all!  But I still thing that they need to be treated differently than user needs, so I usually set them apart and label them “Desired Behavior”. So if User Needs are the goals that the user is planning to achieve while interacting with a product. Desired Behavior are the goals we want the user to want to achieve.

When the user starts an application or enters a web site, they will come with a set of needs and goals the want to achieve. Though, in advertising, we also want to create goals for the user while they are engaged (sell, sell sell! Among other things).  We need to understand these user goals so we can see how we can manage to create all desired behavior into goals. If we create a product, a training program for example, the user might come with a set of goals geared towards training, and while they are achieving those goals, we might engage them to add other goals like buying a specific training product, or sign-up for something.

We could always call these goals Business goals, but I think that we need to see them from the User’s POV in order to understand the best way to create conversion.