I'm hoping to equip you with a linguistic exercise that you can do by yourself or in a team, to help with the process of generating product ideas in a fast and structured way.
Having an idea of human needs should be a minimum for new product ideas, helping to provide benefit with:
The exercise is going to be an adaptation of the psychological framework for human needs known as Maslow's hierarchy of need.
Coming up with product ideas can be a chaotic task, from my own experience going into lockdown I needed a product idea to keep me busy, and I was all over the place, trying the old "Uber for X" exercise to try bring some direction to it, but I wasn't getting very far.
But take a step back, what is Uber, what does it provide, zoom out of the big picture of what it provides on a needs basis, why is it so popular, be proactive rather than getting yourself trapped in a thought loop which has been overused.
That's when I started looking more into user-need-based product ideation, however the caveat for this is that it requires prior knowledge of whom you're going to build for initially, from which the user research can be an expensive task when there is no notion of what you're going to build.
This is what motivated me to try construct a way of thinking to aid me with coming up with ideas.
The idea was to look at a higher-level view of user needs, think of this as our approach being how we view a library (human behaviour), you can go closer and read the details of the book (user needs), or you can step back and look at the categories and why they're there (human needs).
So, when we're talking about a zoom-out from user need, as mentioned before, what we will see is human need, this got me thinking about how it could be done in a structured way.
Which then led me to looking into psychology concepts that can show this, naturally causing me to gravitate towards using Maslow's hierachy of human need, which I will give some detail about in the next section.
I won't bore you with blocks of wikipedia content (if you want more in-depth detail I've added a further reading section at the end) however I'll share my perspective on what it is in my mind, and how it helped me construct an exercise that has helped me generate product ideas.
If you find any reference to maslows hierarchy of needs, you'll notice that it's a pyramid shape, this was devised by Abraham Maslow who is a renowned American psychologist.
A way of thinking about it is as one need gets fulfilled, then the next need becomes the focus, and the needs get more complex as the hierarchy gets climbed.
Each of these portions represents a high level perspective of a need we "need" as humans, it can also be portrayed as "motivations" too, but for the context of this article we're going to keep it as needs.
Try this as a thought exercise, without solutionising, find:
Working from the top down:
You can probably feel where this is going after reading just the definitions of the sections of the pyramid, these needs "need" to be satisfied.
As it's within our nature to want to strive towards these needs, and an appropriate product can act as a conduit for satisfying these, especially in our digital age; and only if done with care & compassion for whom you're building for, this can then provide opportunities for your place of work or your own ventures with a human-centric idea.
The approaches you can take need a some initial considerations, thinking user first or idea first:
Then the choice of scope of human need consideration:
Pick a section of the hierarchy of needs and immerse yourself as a user who if had a product, it would help them fulfill this need.
Consider all of the words associated with this need, time-box a session to allow yourself or a group to think about it on a deep level, anyone can do this as we're all human just make sure there's no judgement and allow conversation to flow when extrapolating needs into contextual words (think of this like generating a word cloud).
Example: I've chosen Safety, I'm going to spend 5 minutes just thinking about what words could be associated with this: Security, Financial, Health, Home, Travel, Protection, Information, Responsibility.
Now you have some words associated to the need that you're focusing on, let's extrapolate these words into action statements, such as "to achieve..", "to feel...", etc..
Example: Using the words from previous example:
As you can see there is a progressive explosion of ideas that could be translated into product opportunities, and they have been derived purely from human need, rather than user research.
With these statements you can think about persona's, and empathise with them in the context of the statement, to generate ideas.
A good way to help visual thinkers would be to draw the person associated with the statement, add character and emotion to it so that people in the group can empathise easier and drive storytelling, ensure that you prioritise statements in relation to "who does this most relate to".
There is also a way of driving user-centredness using this, by speaking to users groups for whom you have a hypothesis of, by thinking who would be most impactful for if acted upon.
You could ask them to order the statements into what they find most important, or could even ask them to add another, or even disagree completely, it's all a process. Don't have an ego about ideas, assumption first, confirmation with real results and testing before turning into a vision.
This is a similar sort of exercise as the singular one, however it makes you think about the association between sections.
The approach is very intuitive and great for groups, I believe the best way to learn this is by first understanding the example and then try it yourself, and you might even come across patterns that sound like very impactful startups/businesses you use every day, and hopefully if this works for you then someone else may come across your venture as a human need pattern in the future 🙂.
I personally believe this method is really powerful for creating digital solutions as it can help you form much more scalable solutions, so lets get started.
Start with 2 needs that you feel semantically can be connected, and produce words associated for each of them, I'll produce an example:
Example: I feel that Self transcendence & Safety could be an exciting thought experiment, always ensure to think progressively and timebox yourself. Safety: Security, Financial, Health, Home, Travel, Protection, Information, Responsibility, Employment, Comfort. Self transcendence: Share, Teach, Inspire, Create, Connect, Help.
Now you have some logical consideration to play around with, merging these two sets of words into action statements, similar to the singular method.
Example: Using the words from previous example:
As you can see again there is a lot of workable thoughts from just merging two together.
An opportunity from this point would be attaching personas to the statements (such as in the singular approach), do user research with a questionnaire based on your derived assumption and fail fast!
As an expansive exercise, try layering more needs, and make an effort to consider merging in context from the top levels of the hierarchy, as this can have a great impact on customer satisfaction.
This is a very simple but I feel elegant solution to generating an idea that has a backend of a human needs basis, which is a perfect idea-generator for UCD (User Centred Design) processes.
Which could then potentially be brought in to a design sprint with an empathised user group, aligning your product with a foundation of care to aid with human need, an understanding of your users on an emotional level and a problem to solve.
Another strong consideration is to not solutionise, always keep it an open, don't think about technology just yet, that comes into the empathy phase where you can drive that thinking.
Believe in the power of perspective of the individuals in your group, many people will have different interpretations of the context of the need, there are no wrong answers, but opportunities to explore.
(!!) An important remark is that what you're generating is assumptions, always be sure to test them on a specific user group, using a measure which is understandable by you or your group, and contextually sound to your experiment.
The good thing about having a structured approach to coming up with product ideas is that you can fail fast, dont waste your time & money, you have a list of potential avenue's as a result of going through this process so make an effort to test them all in a prioritised manner, use sites like Google or Product hunt to try see if there are startups trying to suffice or disrupt the approach to that need with a digital product.
Make an effort to try understand the market around the idea you have generated from the human need, generate niches from exploring avenues, understand your users, make an effort to focus on exploring how this could change their life, speak to people, the most powerful tool you have for failing fast in startup thinking is use your connections, ask your family, friends, family friends, get opinions, make notes of these and take a structured scientific approach to it and learn from your mistakes.
But most of all have fun with the experience, your learning, make notes, share it with people and drive future innovation!
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope it's inspired any way of thinking, I really enjoy using this method to keep me aligned when coming up with ideas and I'd be happy to hear how you apply this or if it has helped you in any way 🙂.
I'm not a psychologist in any sense, but I have an appreciation for strategies than can help drive thinking, hopefully this can open up an aspect for you in a way of taking advantage of what's available from other apsects of understanding, find what works for you and share it!
| 2021-12-11 - Ideation |
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| A random idea I had when trying to think of ways to generate ideas for products when inspiration is lacking, something I have used in the past personally. |
| Think this would help others? |
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