Assessing quality of unmet user needs: Effects of need statement characteristics

•We efficiently capture unmet needs from diverse groups to inform effective design.•We analyze effects of need statement characteristics on rated quality of the needs.•The first needs to come to mind are not lower quality than later needs.•User research can combine prolonged engagement with brief input from large groups.•Commonly stated needs are rated equivalent in quality as uncommon need statements.

We demonstrate a front-end, user-centered method to prioritize unmet needs previously generated from large groups. Several hypotheses were tested: (1) Needs submitted first will be less likely to be high quality than needs submitted after a sustained period of time; (2) Semantically similar need statements will be rated as equivalent in quality; (3) Need statements will be rated as higher quality if a detailed description of the need context was available. Over 20 000 ratings for 1697 statements across three common product areas were analyzed. The results showed needs that first come to mind are not lower quality than needs that come to mind later and can inform early design phases to balance in-depth research and size of user groups.