Seeking feedback: the scoping <-> needs assessment spectrum

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We’re working on summarizing needs assessment work we did for an NAPDC grant. Adie prompted an issue that has come up again and again and I’ve realized that maybe a graphic could be helpful to describe it.

The issue is there are many ways to describe how work/needs gets clarified… from straightforward and constrained software scoping to broad ecosystem mapping or the needs assessment or a large organization (like our work with the USDA).

Here’s a simple graphic that might (?) help describe useful methods for how work/needs get clarified, and give a useful framing so people know what tools to use for their application.

I feel like this is helpful… but maybe I’m duplicating work (esp. pinging @sudokita and @julietnpn given your background knowledge, and the stuff in your GOAT zine you made last time would all map into here IMO), or maybe it’s only landing with me.

It’s something we’d like to put on our website because often people don’t even know what they want… then they can point and say ‘yeah… that describes me… I want that’ at least. So…

  1. Has this already been described like this?
  2. Is this useful?
  3. What else goes on this map?
  4. Anything else really…

Thanks for the feedback!

Greg

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  1. Not sure, I haven’t honestly looked.
  2. I like this. It makes sense and would be a helpful tool for me to explain to folks the kinds of work and processes available under a needs assessment umbrella.
  3. Perhaps longitudinal research-focused needs assessment efforts that includes things like document reviews and systematic lit reviews. I’d say its like Community-Wide Needs Assessment++.
  4. In a way I like how much space is available on the chart because it invites folks to chart their specific flavor of needs assessment, even per project - like a planning worksheet. It could be fun to have something like this at the next GOAT and let people add methods/processes.
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Really like this.

  1. Also haven’t looked.
  2. I think so - I bet that if you tried using this in some discovery conversations with potential clients you’d get some good feedback on what’s useful and what’s missing.
  3. Maybe there’s a layer of detail? Is this a 0-1 scoping of something totally new or building on top of a product / organization that already has a set structure.
  4. Related to the above, I think any of these can be reduced in time if you reduce the scope of what you’re assessing. So diligently defining the boundaries in all of these is important, but especially for the ones in the top right quadrant.
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  1. I’ve not seen a diagram like this that I recall.
  2. It certainly seems useful to me in charting the spectrum of options in a needs assessment process. I think it will need some detailing out in order to make sense and be clear to a potential client/partner - a short description and list of activities for each of the approaches would go a long way. I agree with the sentiment that an added layer of new or existing product/organization would help (maybe a set of icons that would go next to each approach).
  3. I’m curious as to what you’ll call the “things” in the map. Are they methods, approaches, processes, packages, custom set of activities…?
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Ok - good to know, thx.

Things… are methods or approaches yeah I’m imagining. Sometimes they can be short tools (like Ankita has a handbook of these, some as short as 30 minutes, that can fit in here). Some are strings of specific tools into a method like our internal needs assessment process. But they should be specific, identifiable, and useful IMO.

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Some things to check out:

  1. TLDR: there’s similar stuff out there, but when people need a map a specific sampling of methods wrt effort and goals, they’ll typically create something like yours, mapping methods-in-use wrt organizational capacity (incl. resources) and design/research goals.

    • There’s variations on the theme of this type of diagram and the concepts at the core of the diagram, i.e., navigating the UX methods space based on time + resources, goals, needs. This is a fairly robust area of design education, drawing from industry-based and academic research (resulting in best practices recommendations re: which methods to use when): typically published in HCI textbooks, sometimes journals, and often general design websites. Sharing some example resources from websites I frequent:
      • I point students to this resource as a quick references to get oriented wrt methods available: Method Library — This is Service Design Doing . we’ll talk about methods selection based on the stage of design you’re in (e.g., brainstorming vs prototyping vs testing, how much effort each can take (and how to reduce effort or increase rigor), and the value of different methods wrt design in research and/or practice.
      • Another website I use when looking to share tutorials/explainers for various methods has a fairly typical listing of how different types of methods balance goals/resources, including suggestions for methods for smaller budgets, for example. Effectively Planning UX Design Projects — Smashing Magazine
      • Nielson Norman group (another popular UX group/resource) has a nice cheat sheet: UX Research Cheat Sheet - NN/G but focused on goals not effort involved
      • and noww, for the closes set of diagrams to yours: When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods - NN/G

  2. I think it’s useful as a specific mapping of your experiences with these methods in this domain. Not as much in terms of a generic map of needs assessment methods.

    • I’m reminded of effort-value or impact-value type matrices that are used for task prioritization in project planning (e.g., described here 5 Prioritization Methods in UX Roadmapping - NN/G ). I wonder if that might be a helpful reframing of the diagram?

  3. See previous resources. There’s so many more methods available and the complexity, effort, time for different methods can be adjusted. I think picking which methods go on a map like this is more about (a) your desired user research / product design goals and (b) the capacity of the organizations using the diagram/who would do the work on the diagram.

  4. some other notes:

    1. I take wouldn’t necessarily tag the two needs assessment buckets tagged as “academic-level publishable results” – that can be true for any method (see the digital ACM library for publications using many many methods). what is “publishable” is a matter of generalizability of the findings, implications for design, methodological rigor and other scientific method attributes of a study, not just that a particular method was used.
    2. similarly, interviews (the method at the heart for the needs assessment variant you’ve chosen to display) can be designed to be hypothesis-driven. In the same way that you can have case studies that are explanatory more than just exploratory.

bonus-TLDR: kita loves talking about methods sorrrrryyyy for the long message

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