I came across this interview with Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella where he described one of their goals as meeting the “unarticulated needs” of their users. I’d never heard this phrase used in a design context and it caught my attention. There was something about it so I wanted to write this post to talk out my thoughts.

Usually in design you talk in terms of jobs to be done, user journeys, or personas, and while these things are valuable, they put distance between you and users. They make you feel more like a researcher observing a subject and not a person empathizing with another person. I often feel like a nature photographer trying to anticipate where a herd of wildebeests are going to go. The word “unarticulated” though, somehow feels closer, like it’s speaking distance.

Another things is an “unarticulated need” implies the product already exists in the mind of the user, and your job is to simply to give it a voice and make it real. You’re not trying to “innovate” (i.e. create something more cool and new than actually needed), you’re listening to and bringing an idea to life.

In software (where I work), design has become scientific and clinical. There are a hundred books about a hundred topics – research, defining customers, design, optimizing everything – each with a theory and framework to follow. "Just follow these steps and you’ll have your answer" is the promise. The problem is design isn’t science. It deals with humans and they don’t act according to formulas frameworks. Design is art and emotion meeting engineering, so you have to keep that human connection, which means getting closer to people.

So yeah, “unarticulated need”… I like that phrase :)