#42 The answer is 'Yes'

When you’re gathering requirements for a product, feature, or project, the last question you should be asking is ‘Would you like…‘?

Would you like to have a car? Would like it to fit in a backpack? Would you want it to be able to fly? Would you want it to be able to land and take off in your backyard? Would you want it to need just a bit of solar energy to work? Who wouldn’t, right?! Is it viable, though? Hardly.

And yet, time and again, folks gauging user interest, keep asking: would you like the app to do x? Of course they would! It doesn’t cost them anything and who doesn’t like to get free stuff. More is better, right?

So what should you do instead to understand what your users need? Consider these questions: what is the most urgent problem you have when it comes to x? If you had $10, on which feature would you spend it? If you could have one feature, which one would it be? Could you order these features by their importance to you?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash