Overview
'User needs' are needs that users have of a service. They express people’s goals, values, and aspirations.
You must meet your user needs for your user to be able to achieve something.
Learn how to research your users and their needs.
Documenting and communicating what you learn about your users and their needs makes sure:
- your team has a shared understanding
- you have something you can refer back to when needed
- other teams can benefit and use your findings to inform their work too
User needs can represent one or more users, and do not include any personal details.
They usually start at a high level, are broad in scope, and remain relatively consistent over time.
You can continue to validate and include more detail as you learn more from your users.
Documenting user needs
You can document your understanding of your user and their needs in different ways, including:
- experience maps
- user journey maps
- user personas
- user or job stories
User needs should be:
- based on evidence from user research, not assumptions
- focussed on the user’s problems rather than possible solutions
- documented or written in the user’s language
Your user’s language includes words, phrases, and concepts they’re familiar with.
Writing user and job stories, and acceptance criteria
You can document and communicate your understanding of your users in many ways, but user stories and job stories are a common format.
You can use them to prioritise and manage work, track tasks and activities, and assess whether you’re meeting user needs.
When writing job and user stories, use the language of your users and focus on what matters most to them.
User stories
A user story looks like this:
As a… [user]
I want/need/expect to… [action]
So that I can… [goal]
For example,
As a… student living in Wales
I need to… know how much discount I get for my council tax
So that I can… plan my finances
Job stories
The focus of job stories is less on the user and more on the task they’re trying to do.
A job story looks like this:
When I… [situation]
I want/need/expect to… [action]
So that I can… [goal]
For example:
When I… am calculating my council tax
I need to… know what discounts I am eligible for
So that I can… plan my finances ahead
Acceptance criteria
You can use your user or job stories to develop a list of things your user needs to know, do or get for your service to be successful.
This is called ‘acceptance criteria’.
For example, the story is done when the user knows:
- what discounts they’re eligible for
- how much their discounts are
- how much their council tax is