Resources: Archives — Past Meetings — 2004

(Past Meetings: 2004 2003 2002)

January 21, 2004

Uncovering the Customer's Unstated Needs to Create Successful New Products

Needs and Wants: the Difference Between Success and Failure

"Talk to the users!" That's the mantra heard at every marketing conference. But if a product does not yet exist, how do you talk to a user? Once you get yourself in front of the right people, how do you interpret what they really need when they express themselves exclusively in terms of what they want? What's the difference between wants and needs anyway? Finally, how do you translate goals into a requirements document that everybody in your organization will sign off on?

Developers get frustrated by requirements documents filled with contradictory descriptions of large yet lightweight features that are black yet white, and which smell of apples yet of oranges as well. They want specificity. Meanwhile, potential product users are afraid to be perceived as too thick because they don't know what "128-bit encryption" is. How to negotiate the horns of this dilemma?

David Fore is VP of Consulting Services at Cooper, a San Francisco firm that designs products for the digital age. David will discuss how Cooper's Goal-Directed Method reveals human motivations and results in well-designed solutions appropriate to human contexts. The result can be happier users, more profitable products, and more purposeful development organizations.

David Fore, VP Consulting Services
As Vice President of Consulting Services at Cooper, David is responsible for determining the needs of clients, overseeing the application of the Goal-Directed Method, and ensuring successful project outcomes. This cradle-to-grave approach allows David to capture and analyze best practices that replenish the methodology. David also provides design consulting services and teaches courses in the method. In his six-plus years at Cooper, David has served as a design consultant on a wide range of projects, including manufacturing scheduling, medical informatics, enterprise resource planning, teleconferencing, securities trading, and content management. Before Cooper, he designed software, wrote about design and technology, and taught. — No presentation available - see www.cooper.com for details