How to define the needs and wants of your community, identify pain points and gain insights into opportunities
Useful feedback and input from your community of users can help you improve your brand and product innovatively
In the simplest terms, the needs and wants of your community are the actions they are trying to accomplish by interacting with you, your brand or your product or company. They are the verbs they use in the sentences they say or type to you, your brand or your product or company. They are the job or jobs they want you, your brand or your product or company to do for them.
Different schools of thought have defined different ways to ascertain this, but here, I will share the simplest way I have applied. To be able to use or apply this way, you will need to increase your ability to empathise and your ability to listen. Once these are done, you will do some research by asking a set of questions or following these questions as prompts to guide your users into showing and or telling you what their wants and needs are.
Please go through and study this process in the order they are shared as there is a rhythm to it that unfolds your understanding in a gradual and precise manner that makes it all easier to follow.
I will share a curated list of links to videos and articles that will help you understand each of these steps in a very down to earth manner. These will give you the mindset or thinking framework you need to find needs and pain points.
If you jump some of the links or jump to the questions to research the needs and insights, you may not be able to get anything useful as it all requires a specific mindset.
Also, note that these abilities take years to develop and going through the steps here requires continuous practice. But in doing them once, your ability increases ever so slightly which is enough to be able to apply it here. The more you practice the better the ability becomes. Let’s start with increasing your abilities to empathise and listen.
1. Increase your ability to empathise
To increase your ability to empathise, you have to:
Understand what empathy is
Understand yourself
Understand your emotions
Understand other people’s emotions
Re-understand what empathy is
Once you are able to do these, your ability to empathise will increase as much as you are able to do each of the steps above.
Links
Understand what empathy is
The first step to understanding people in a community or out in the world is to understand who they are and how they see the world. Empathy helps with this. Watch the video in the link below to understand empathy and how to build your empathy - The Importance of Empathy in Everyday Life [Video]
Understand yourself
Biology is the study of life, which we are a part of. In this video Dr Alan a PhD holder skilled in the fields of Neuroscience and Psychology shares some insight on How to hack your biology and be in the zone every single day - YouTube [Video]
Understand your emotions
Here you will be building your understanding of your own emotions. To help you with this, here are 3 articles:
Building Your Emotional Agility - Emotional Agility [Article]
3 Steps to Better Understand and Work With Your Emotions - 3 Ways to Better Understand Your Emotions [Article]
How to Control Your Emotions During a Difficult Conversation - How to Control Your Emotions During a Difficult Conversation [Article]
Understand other people’s emotions
Next will be understanding other people’s emotions:
To better understand empathy watch this video on people’s expressions and the emotions behind them. It will help build your ability to perceive how people feel - Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care - YouTube [Video]
This video explains the impact emotions have in defining people’s decisions - When Emotions Make Better Decisions - Antonio Damasio - YouTube [Video]
Re-understand what empathy is
And after it all, we’ll go back to where we started from to relook at what empathy is with our newfound understanding - The Importance of Empathy in Everyday Life [Video]
2. Increase your ability to listen
Listening is how you read people. In the links below, different experts share how they have improved their ability to listen and how you to can do it for yourself.
Julian Treasure a sound expert shares why listening is harder in the modern day and the reasons he gives are good points to note and work to manage in your space. He also shares 5 beautiful exercises you can practice to listen better - 5 ways to listen better | Julian Treasure - YouTube
In this TEDx talk on The power of listening, William Ury co-founder of Harvard’s program on negotiation shares what strengths listening can give you in communicating and how it empowers you - The power of listening | William Ury | TEDxSanDiego - YouTube
How always being right is wrong for listening, and listening with compassion and no judgement brings things that are so much better - The Power of Deliberate LIstening | Ronnie Polaneczky | TEDxPhiladelphia - YouTube
And to sum it all up, this wikiHow article - 4 Ways to Listen - wikiHow. It sums all the key parts of listening, especially hearing what is not spoken through words but with emotional cues and body language. In an online community, these emotional cues and body language can be perceived from the choice of words, the tone of the conversation, emojis used and quality of the writing.
Next we’ll delve into how to research and find out your users needs and pain points.
3. Research for needs and insights
Remembering everything you have learned from empathising and listening, follow the prompts below. As you do, you’ll take notes which will be filtered into their needs, wants, pain points and insights for opportunities.
Prompts
Get a willing member of your or a community that is focused on the theme or interest you are building around. Get a pen and paper or a recorder to note their responses too.
You will have to apply your listening skills to truly hear what your or the community member has to say and then your empathy skills to better understand them.
Ask them about the last time they participated in the community with respect to that interest or theme. If they are a community of bike riders, how did their last bike ride go? If they are a learning community or a something around savings or finance, how has learning been for them or saving or spending money. What happened? How was it? What was hard about it, what was easy? How did they find the interest or theme to begin with? How did they find the community or that part of the community they interacted with?
In asking, try to understand what happened and why it happened. Take note of things they find interesting or surprising.
You follow up on their replies asking why to their replies more often. Asking why helps cut through to the true want and need of a person, this video on Why by Simon Sinek explains why Why is important.
Try to ask till you see/hit an emotion as they answer you or try to answer you, especially painful emotions. These emotions are very very key here as it is by easing painful emotions that one’s experience improves. These painful emotions also outline and show the Pain Points in the experience.
Based on your notes or recordings you will now be able to write out 2 lists to complete your research: a Needs list and an Insights list. The Needs list can also be looked at as the Wants list, it shows the possible needs or wants of your community member. The Insight list gives you possible Opportunities to leverage in resolving the perceived needs or wants of the community member or user.
Needs list
Needs are the verbs or actions needed to be done or completed. Based on your notes, write out separately the things your community member was trying to accomplish by participating in the community. In a prompt or question:
What were they trying to do by going through that experience?
What does participating in the community do for them?
Insight list
Insights are the words, phrases, experiences that stood out to you as you spoke or interviewed your community member, so based on your notes, write these out. Write out the things you noticed would be helpful in improving that experience for your user. The items here make up the Opportunities.
And with both lists done, you can speak to a couple more community members to get a feel for more needs, wants and insights. Speaking to a small percentage of your community members is okay to be able to get a general idea of the community’s needs.
Bonus: Create pain or problem statements to help with ideation exercises
You can combine some of the items in your Needs list with items in your Insights list to create a statement or prompt that is helpful to use in starting ideation exercises for your team. Simply fill in the gaps in this sentence following the prompts there-in to create this statement:
MemberName [replace with community member’s name/description] needs/wants a way to _______________________________________ [write out user need], surprisingly // because // but [choose one that flows best to include in the sentence] ___________________________________________ [write insight that flows with the sentence and need].
A completed example would be: Ali needs a way to make the most of his time, but he doesn’t know how to manage his time, he doesn’t even know people can manage their time.