{"id":453,"date":"2020-03-01T07:37:50","date_gmt":"2020-03-01T07:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/humancargo.com\/?p=453"},"modified":"2024-03-17T17:28:37","modified_gmt":"2024-03-17T17:28:37","slug":"user-needs-the-availability-heuristic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/user-needs-the-availability-heuristic\/","title":{"rendered":"User Needs & the Availability Heuristic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u201cPeople don’t want quarter inch drills. They want quarter inch holes.\u201d<\/div>\n
\u2014 Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

What people say they need probably isn’t what they really need. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s easy to confuse process with result, because people like the idea of taking action more than pausing a moment to ponder abstract outcomes. Doing is easier than thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This makes users notoriously unreliable sources of information about what they need. It’s human nature to automatically generate a solution to any problem that presents itself, and the first one that comes to mind then tends to dominate our thinking. This is a version of the availability heuristic:<\/a> the tendency to place greater value on information that comes to mind quickly. And if you ask a user what he needs, I bet you a box of Timbits<\/a> he’ll make the same mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To properly understand a user’s needs, forget tools, the mechanics of the process and the functional requirements document. Features and functions are products of the solution,<\/em> not its drivers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, probe the user’s motivations for a more complete understanding of the problem. Simple task completion might be the wrong success metric if the motive is less tangible, like proving your worth to a team or avoiding becoming a bottleneck in a production pipeline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cPeople don’t want quarter inch drills. They want quarter inch holes.\u201d \u2014 Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School What people say they need probably isn’t what they really need. It’s easy to confuse process with result, because people like the idea of taking action more than pausing a moment to ponder abstract outcomes. Doing is easier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","category-ux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1380,"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions\/1380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/protoncandy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}