

Ask HN: Do users know what they want & how do you test? - quizbiz

It's a continuing theme and I can't seem to get the debate out of my head. Everyone seems to think that users/customers do not know what they want, but let's spin things around. It's easy for me to suggest that users can identify what they do not want. So given the right questions, the proper mechanisms, I tend to believe that users will express their desires.<p>So I wonder how you can best frame tests and questions rather than guess what users want.
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sam_in_nyc
One thing that's permanently changed the way I answer the question "what do
people want" is this video, about how one man discovered that people are
segmented, and they won't tell you what they want:

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spagh...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html)

What you should end up taking away from it is that there is no "perfect" thing
you can offer, but rather several different types that appeal to different
segments of the population. And these segments won't come out and say: "I want
____!!" Using the video's example, when asked what type of coffee people want,
nearly everyone would say "dark rich hearty blend" (or something to that
affect). But what they actually prefer is "milky wheat" coffee. This wasn't
really known until taste tests were done asking people to rate their
satisfaction.. and it turns out there is a strong correlation into these
segments.

Granted, this is all based on food products, but it applies to the web as
well. Jacob Nielson discovered years ago that people are divided into major
groups of searchers and browsers, for finding content. I bet that there are
tons of other segmentations for user interface type things that I just don't
know about (it's not my specialty), as well as expectations for features. For
instance, maybe your users would actually prefer it if your links were bold,
underlined, and blue, and that when you hovered the underline goes away and it
turns a lighter color. Or maybe they'd actually like some sort of RSS feature
(that didn't require them to know what RSS was). _But they probably won't ask
for it._

I don't understand your logic... users know what they don't want... add in
some magic.. and suddenly they will express their desires? If that magic is
the process of deduction, good luck trying every permutation, and seeing if
users don't complain.

I think A/B testing works best to decide between two implementations. And I
think tossing in a new feature and asking: "do you like this" works just as
well.

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mcav
Users express what they want, sure. But it's up to the developer to gather
users' wants and analyze them to search for the reasoning behind the wants.

That's the closest I've been able to come to learning what users want -- they
often can't articulate it well enough.

Conversations go like this:

    
    
      Them: "I want feature X."
        Me: "Why do you want feature X?"
      Them: "Because... uh... I can't do _____."
    

They want feature X _because_ they can't perform action Y.

Users know what they want, but it's more interesting, and often our task, to
discover _why_ they want it.

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eries
The fact that customers don't know what they want is only an obstacle if our
goal is to find out what they think they want. Luckily, our goal is usually to
find out what they actually want, which requires some combination of
listening, experimenting, and learning.

[http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/search/label/liste...](http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/search/label/listening%20to%20customers)

