If you’re just starting out with user needs, we’ve got a handy tool called the user needs playground that will analyse any article and calculate the balance of user need drivers it addresses.

When we were testing it out in its early stages, we pasted all kinds of articles into it, to see what happened.

The user needs playground: a free tool that you’re going to find really useful

Try it out here

Just for fun, we put the story of Little Red Riding Hood into our User Needs Playground. It returned a 100% ‘Emotion’ result. The system knew it was dealing with a certain kind of writing, that does a certain thing, a certain way. We tried it again later with a less well known fable. Same result. It’s a clever piece of kit.

This is a case in which the large language model that supports the User Needs Playground definitely "knows" the narrative in question, since it is a well-known story to which it was almost certainly exposed during training. However, the system is also capable of clearly recognising stories written from an emotional perspective even in unfamiliar content. Beyond the fact that such systems are sensitive to the meaning of the text, they are capable of evaluating a text based on how the author uses language and what their intention is - what they aim to achieve with the text.

smartocto-team-goran

Goran S. Milovanović senior data scientist

There’s a famous six word short story (attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but never confirmed to be his). Our User Needs Playground assesses this to be 100% emotional as well. This is interesting: why doesn’t it decide it’s an advert?

So, we added three extra words: “£20. Collection locally”

Now the picture is very different.

This is more than just a pleasing diversion from ‘real work’. What this shows is that this tool works. It’s well worth bookmarking it on your browser.

And, once you’ve done that, here’s a few things that might help you as well:

I want to:

KNOW more: Read about the fundamentals of the user needs here

UNDERSTAND more: Watch the webinar explaining the user needs here

FEEL more: Get inspired with a user needs client case here

DO more: Download the Playbook here

And, if you’d like to speak to an actual human person, we can arrange that too

contact us

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