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Show HN: A beginner’s guide to finding user needs
https://urbook.fordes.de/ https://urbook.fordes.de/
…a free/libré book about UX research with qualitative methods on motivations, activities written for UX researchers, UX designers and product managers.
I have been writing on this book since about 2010 and did a large rewrite during the first half of 2022. (I initally planned this with a bigger tech publisher).
This is the link to the full book for online reading: https://jdittrich.github.io/userNeedResearchBook/ https://jdittrich.github.io/userNeedResearchBook/ (it’s one long page, so it might take a bit to load)
- crawfordcomeaux 4y agoAfter doing a Ctrl-F for "need" and not finding any distinction between needs and wants, I'm wondering if you understand what a human need is and if this book helps uncover actual needs versus things that aren't needs.
- simulo 4y agoI agree that discussing that distinction [ed: between needs and wants] can make sense. Since the book does not use the concept of needs as an abstract concepts (“what is a Need”) nor as research device (“What are your needs?”) I did not discuss it. Fittingly, if you Ctrl+F for "want" you will not find it being use as a research concept either (There are a lot of "wants" in regards to researcher activities as in "You want to do X after Y")
- xwowsersx 4y agoTheir critique might've been helpful/valid if approached correctly, I don't know. I do know that Ctrl+F'ing through a 30K+ word book in search of the word "need" in order to call out the absence of some very specific thing they decided is essential, without actually reading the book, seems to me like idle sniping and not a genuine critique. It comes across as peevish and snarky. To the OP, the book looks interesting and I've started reading it from the top. FWIW btw, it loads very quickly on my end.
- tbrownaw 4y agoI'd think that sort of thing would be in a section on feature prioritization or scoping an MVC. I don't see a section like that in the toc, and it feels like it would be rather out-of-scope for what this is about. Not that I've finished reading the whole thing in detail yet.
- simulo 4y agoYes, I deliberately avoided to put feature prioritization or even personas or Jobs-To-Be-Done in the book — there are too many ways to do this and it is of no use if I write about one and the team/PM/company prefers another.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dang 4y agoI'm afraid your comment here has broken both the HN site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." ... and has also broken the extra guidelines that apply to Show HN threads (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Can you please follow the rules in the future? We want HN to be a place where people's work can be discussed respectfully and substantively. There's plenty of room for asking questions, offering critiques, and so on, but we don't want a putdown culture of trying to make others look like idiots. There's enough of that elsewhere on the internet.
- tbrownaw 4y ago"Need" vs "want" is a false dichotomy. It's actually a spectrum, and there's no single obviously correct position to split it at to reduce to a binary.
- deerdeerdeer 4y agoCongrats Jan!! :)
- karaterobot 4y agoThis is good advice, plainly written. Thanks for the resource!
- simulo 4y agoThanks! Feel free to poke me if there in an occasional sentence that is not as plainly written as it could be:)
- rsavage 4y agoLooks interesting. Awesome work putting this together! I will bookmark and take a proper read when I can. For the website - might be worth running it through a spell checker. E.g found this pretty quickly “Early in the reserach session”
- simulo 4y agoOhno, “reserach” is my favorite spelling mistake. I regularly search-replace for it and regularly create new reseraches.
- defanor 4y agoIndeed, I spotted a couple of typos too: "This book is free/libé", "to provide detaile information". Also noticed that foreground colors are defined in the HTML version, while the background color isn't, and the blockquote foreground color doesn't meet the AAA level of WCAG contrast guidelines even if white background is assumed. That's rather nitpicky, and generally it's fine, but it feels like materials on UI and UX should better follow common guidelines.
- simulo 4y agoThanks! I pushed a version without the typos and slightly more contrasting colors, including a defined background color.
- mustafabisic1 4y agoDo you write on a regular basis? Is there a place to subscribe? I'd definitely love to hear out your process of creating these. P.S. I created a resource for remote-working parents. It's a weekly newsletter for now, but who knows, I might have enough value one day to do what you did here. https://thursdaydigest.com/ https://thursdaydigest.com/
- simulo 4y agoI do blog on https://fordes.de https://fordes.de (with an RSS to subscribe to)
- mustafabisic1 4y agoNice, thanks!
- pier25 4y agoWhy "libré" with a tilde? The word for "free" in Spanish is "libre". "Libré" is a past form of the verb "librar". It has many meanings but I guess the most common one is "to avoid".
- cowpig 4y agosame in French (also no accent)
- spookybones 4y agoThat accent is too cute to be a tilde.
- pier25 4y agoRight, sorry. In English the tilde is the squiggly symbol over the Ñ, but in Spanish any accent is considered a tilde.
- simulo 4y agohmm, goooooood point. I wonder why I did this. Thanks for pointing this out!