From the first model popularized by Dmitry Shishkin at the BBC in 2017, to hundreds of implementations across the media industry today, the User Needs Model has had a huge impact on journalism and ensuring content better meets the needs of users.
To support you in implementing your own User Needs Model, this article benchmarks some of the versions being used by media organizations, many of whom have adapted a user need or two to their unique content and audience.
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The original User Needs
Shishkin’s 2017 User Needs Model, implemented first at the BBC, was made up of 6 categories:
- Update me
- Keep me on trend
- Inspire me
- Divert me
- Educate me
- Give me perspective
More recently, together with Smartocto, Shishkin developed this into the User Needs Model 2.0, a more comprehensive and practical version.
This updated version is built around the 4 states of knowing, doing, feeling and understanding, each with 2 basic needs.
- Know – keep me engaged and update me
- Understand – educate me and give me perspective
- Feel – inspire me and divert me
- Do – connect me and help me
Should you adapt the User Needs Model to your audience and content?
As Dmitry Shishkin puts it, user needs models always come from your audience, and given that each publishers’ audience is unique, this suggests the model should be adapted to ensure content matches and satisfies your user’s needs, not the other way round.
‘I always recommend starting by asking yourself why you exist in the market. Effectively, your mission statement should reflect the user needs you declare to satisfy. So it’s ok to be only about Give me perspective and Help me, if your newsroom is not set up to provide the best quality Update me or Keep me Engaged stories.
Conversely, if Update me is something you do anyway, and do it well, concentrate on making sure that your ‘slow coverage’ aligns with user needs as effectively as possible. It’s a typical Pareto principle, if 80% of your content is Update me, make sure that the other 20% perform as best as they can and this is where user needs help enormously. Effectively, anything that you pre-plan must satisfy a user need, other than Update me.
Ultimately, any model, irrespective of how exactly you name each user needs, will represent the four axis of ‘fact-context-emotion-action’ structure in some shape of form. You might have 3 specific needs in one category and only one in another, but you should have all these axes represented. User-centricity is paramount.“
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (UK)
Audience Editor, Oliver Kemp, shared that Dmitry’s user needs model was instrumental in TBIJ rethinking its output for audiences interested in investigative journalism.
“Before adapting the framework, we did some extensive audience interview and survey work to discover more about how TBIJ’s audience consumes its content. The two prevailing details were found in what respondents wanted to see more of: simple explanations of complex topics, and an understanding about how we investigated certain topics. This allowed us to develop a set of user needs based on both TBIJ’s core mission and things the audience said it wanted.
1) Expose, our traditional investigative reveal, a know/fact driven user need. This is our more traditional investigative reveals.
2) Discover. This is to educate the audience on complex topics, usually in the form of explainers or analysis pieces.
3) Involve. This is to reveal to the audience how we’ve reported a certain topic. It may be a first-person report from on the ground, or a light piece about the frustrations of searching through gigabytes of shipping data.
4) Spark. This is saved for updating the audience on the impact investigations have had. The idea is to foster a sense that journalism can have a positive effect on the world in which we live.
“TBIJ is an unusual newsroom in that it does not publish with the volume of a daily newsroom. Audiences are not coming to TBIJ for their daily news as they would other outlets, so the user needs had to be adapted to fit the stream of content it produces.
‘Involve’ and ‘Discover’ user needs pieces give the newsroom an opportunity to adapt investigative content to suit the needs of its readers, but still be focused on investigations as opposed to pivoting to ‘update me’ or ‘divert me’ content.”
Berlingske Media (Denmark)
Lars K.Jensen spoke at the inaugural Audiencers’ Festival in London about his work on integrating User Needs at Berlingske, sharing that the project took a year – starting with analysis and presentations, buy-in from editorial teams at each title and workshops with each department (for instance with exercises to understand the user need that each article falls under).
One of the essential steps in this process was developing a shared language on user needs and understanding audiences across titles. I.e. What is a connect me story? Does everyone agree on this definition?
Interestingly, in the user need model at Berlingske, Jensen said they are focusing on what users see above the paywall — a headline, image, and two or three paragraphs of text.
“That’s what we look at when we determine what [category] a user need a story belongs to,” he explained. “And we do that because it’s sort of based on conversion. In a sense, we also see choosing to read an article as a kind of conversion.”
> If you’re working on User Needs, we’d recommend following Lars’ Products in Publishing for the expertise needed to master this model (and more)
Beobachter (Switzerland)
In an interview with Journalism.co.uk, the Beobachter team shared that they’d already developed a pretty clear mission which was based on established reader needs, such as “Expose wrongdoings,” “Provide context,” “Touch and entertain me,” “Inspire me,” “Address it,” “Help me,” and “Explain it to me.” Some of these are already defined with the user needs model, but others veer towards ‘brand specific user needs’, which the model allows for within broader user needs.
The top user needs for converting readers to subscribers emerged as “Expose wrongdoings,” “Touch and entertain me,” and “Help me.”
“Experiment with the user needs. Get a feeling of your own product through that and then be ambitious to find the user needs which really fit your product” says editor-in-chief Dominique Strebel.
Freie Presse and Die Rheinpfalz (Germany)
The Digital Revenue Initiative (DRIVE) team shared insights from their user needs implementation programme, including details on the various models used by publishers across Germany and their impact on engagement and conversion rate.
At Freie Presse, the category “shrock me” performed highly in terms of Media Time for its regional and emotional stories. The name is a combination of “shock me” and “rock me”.
Whilst the stories that scored particularly well in the Rheinpfalz were those that addressed people’s worries and fears, thus satisfying their need for security and stability.
Ringier Media (Global)
Now CEO at Ringier Media International, Dmitry Shishkin has implemented the User Needs 2.0 into Ringier brands whilst also developing section-specific user needs.
“Once you start improving individual sections, you’ll notice that some of them perform better with specific user needs, and it’s ok. You might have a general user needs model for your newsroom as a whole, but in reality each beat, or each section will have its own collection that works well. I would only discourage you from thinking that a particular topic always matches a particular user need (Politics = Give me perspective. Science = Educate me. Entertainment = Divert me). Such intellectual laziness will always restrict your creativity and ultimately well lead to diminishing impact and weaken originality. Always push yourself and challenge received wisdom – can we tell this story with an usual need.
At Ringier Media International, we are quite deep into applying the model, and we do it methodically, section by section. In Slovakia’s Aktuality, for example, they started creating more Help me content for their Culture section and it started performing as well as Give me Perspective pieces. Or in Serbian Blic, they also identified the potential of Help me stories on their Business section, and we also saw average article reads grow in that area. It’s important that each section’s editor understands what works and what doesn’t, yet they should keep challenging their teams using audience data. When working with user needs, it’s especially important to look at cohort’s, not individual stories’ performance.“
The Conversation (UK)
The Conversation defined 4 user needs to be valuable to their audience:
- Motivate me: advice, guides
- Educate me: explainers
- Keep me on trend: quickly getting in the know
- Give me perspective: analysis to broaden horizons
Running user research on this model, “Motivate me” surfaced as the greatest need, whilst “Give me a perspective” had a less great need, which matched users’ on-site behaviors.
> User research: How The Conversation used a decision-first approach to inform two key products
Oberbayerisches Volksblatt (Germany)
Based on Fredric Karén’s bucket system
DPG Media (Netherlands)
DPG Media uses six needs, divided into two categories: for the head and for the heart.
For the head:
- Update me
- Give me context
- Help me
For the heart:
- Touch me
- Make me feel connected
- Surprise me
Vox (US)
“Vox’s mission is to help users ‘understand the news’. By default everything they do falls under the category of ‘educate me’ or ‘give me perspective’, but what they’ve done is develop their own subsets of user needs of those two master user needs.” Shishkin shares
Their user needs therefore include:
- Surface something hidden
- Bring clarity
- Explore solutions
- Connect micro to macro
- Dissect complicated issues
Vogue (Global)
According to a brilliant article by Francesco Zaffarano on Medium, the audience research team at Condé Nast surveyed 3000 loyal readers of 11 Vogues (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, and Russia) and 2000 people who don’t read Vogue but are interested in fashion. As a result, the audience research team identified six readers’ needs – “inspire me”, “educate me”, “divert me”, “update me”, “make me responsible” and “connect me”.
The team then went through every story published within a month period, assessing the needs a story met.
After analyzing impact of each user need – for instance “inspire me” (highest av. readership) and “educate me” content over performed, whilst “update me” under performed, despite making up 38% of all stories – recommendations were made to teams across the world.
For Vogue India, by reducing the number of “update me” stories to <15%, the number of users grew by 129% year-on-year.
Others worth noting
- Schibsted Media Group‘s (Norway) Fredric Karén developed a system known as the bucket model for the Norwegian business newspaper, E24.
- Bonnier (Sweden) include “Give me a favour”
- Lensing Media (Germany), based on Dmitry Shishkin’s system, including “Make it easier for me” and “Give me depth”
- South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) include “Keep me on trend”
- Wall Street Journal (US) include “Give me an edge”
- The Atlantic (US)
- Buzzfeed‘s (US) cultural mapping of content
- TRT World (Turkey) include “FOMO” and “Challenge me”
- New York Times (US) include “Connect me with ideas”, “Make me think” and “Enrich my life”
