Online Programs
Lecture: User Needs
Prof. Albrecht Schmidt on uncovering user needs, Maslow, and the task-artifact cycle. Companion for DES-280 and OPS-310.
Civic-tech studios fail when teams ship features nobody asked for. Ruiz and the product-operations course use this lecture to talk about needs versus imagined tasks.
Full lecture on HCI Lecture (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Schmidt covers why user needs are hard to elicit, how technology creates new needs, Maslow’s theory of motivation, and the task-artifact cycle—with English captions on the recording.
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Transcript (caption excerpt)
User needs In this blog, we look at the complex relationship between user needs and the technologies we can build. People have needs, and they can articulate these needs. From these needs arise ideas for products, and when we build products, they typically satisfy a need that users have. At the same time, however, certain technologies also create new needs. We will take a close look at Maslow's motivation theory and the task artifact page, and we will also give various examples. Can't we simply ask the user? Can't we ask, "What do you need? What should we build?" Here is an example build?" Here is an example video video video [Music], and this is a negative view of what happens when we only ask the user what they can imagine. Very often, these are ideas that the person has previously seen in films, read in books, or seen in science fiction. And it is very difficult to really find out users' needs by simply asking them. This is very problematic because it is very strongly driven by what… Users have already seen this, and it's very often either very unrealistic or very, very often either very unrealistic or very, very modern. modern. If we look at these two phones here, if I ask you how you can improve the phone,


