Khalil A. Cassimally is an audience consultant and coach who helps organisations align teams around change, user needs and AI. 

Audience and funnel work succeeds or fails on internal communication, yet few people get structured support to improve it. Drawing on recent research and his own practice, he shares a practical three-step way to use AI to:
> Understand your intervention style
> Identify strengths and gaps in how you communicate
> Take small, intentional steps to improve how your communication skills

Khalil A. Cassimally, Consultant in Audience Development, User Needs & AI, and regular contributor to Audiencers, shares 7 strategies to not only become data-informed, but data-led.
1. Data is a compass, not a map
2. Connect every role to the bigger goal
3. User value first; business follows
4. Don't focalise on tools
5. Create one source of truth
6. Start with one analysis, and keep going
7. Optimise the funnel; small lifts compound

Khalil is an advocate for audiences-driven approaches in the media industry. He consults, advises, and mentors teams and individuals at media organisations worldwide, helping them shape stronger, more connected societies, focusing mainly on user needs, product work and AI. 

In this article, Khalil summarises his session at The Audiencers' Festival London 2025 where he interviewed Oliver Kemp on his work on user needs at TBIJ.

The key insight here is: serving people’s needs. Today’s successful media operations understand that addressing the needs of audiences underpins everything. And many achieve this by integrating the user needs model into their operations.

One media operation that has implemented the user needs model successfully is The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) in the UK. For TBIJ, it’s not about clicks – it has no shareholder to please – it’s about depth and transparency. Its mission is to hold power to account.

Oliver Kemp, TBIJ’s Audience Editor, led the model’s newsroom implementation. When I interviewed him at The Audiencers’ Festival in London, he shared valuable insights about the journey and critical factors for successfully rolling out user needs in a newsroom.

> Here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing user needs in a newsroom of any size.

TBIJ’s unique set of user needs

Integrating user needs opened new pathways for TBIJ to provide value to people. While its core journalism seeks to show abuses of power, talking directly to its audiences convinced Oliver and team that there are opportunities to provide more value by serving more needs.

This led them to create their own user needs model – one deeply representative of their audiences’ needs and fully aligned with TBIJ’s mission.

Creating a unique model helps bring a newsroom closer to its audiences. Beyond exposing abuses of power, TBIJ now aims to help people discover and learn about complex topics (often related to their investigations); involve people by being transparent about their journalistic process; and spark people into realising the good journalism can do by showing the real-world impact of their work.

A unique model can also win over more ambivalent colleagues for two reasons:

• Collectivity: creating the unique model offers an opportunity to bring colleagues along in the process. Oliver highlighted how he addressed scepticism and fostered stronger ownership of the final model.
• Relatability: the unique user needs tend to align closely with the operation’s mission, making them more relatable to colleagues and improving acceptance.

“The first step is to talk directly to your audience … These conversations can take many forms – surveys, interviews, focus groups, or even informal chats – but the goal is the same: to hear in their own words what they value, what they struggle to find elsewhere, and how your journalism can serve them better. This insight becomes the foundation for tailoring the model to fit your unique context.”

Creating a unique model requires considerable work and initial good faith from decision-makers, as results don’t typically appear in the short-term. This is why most media operations aren’t best-placed to create a unique model when beginning to implement user needs. For most operations, allocating resources is a constant battle, and the need to show results quickly is essential for future investment.

Using the plug-and-play user needs model is a perfect starting point for most operations, with creating a unique model more feasible when they are ready to double down on user needs.

Acting on the user needs

With the model in place, it’s time to identify how well (or not!) the newsroom is currently serving the user needs. The aims are to create a reference for gauging the impact of user needs-informed journalism, and to understand which user needs to prioritise (and deprioritise).

For most media operations, TBIJ included, the content audit forms the bulk of this work. The audit involves tagging hundreds of recently-published content with the user need each serves. 

Once the tagging is completed, the charts that change everything can be generated. These charts are the artefacts that will convince colleagues to take action. They showcase:

• The reference: how a media operation’s content currently serves user needs.
• The actions to take: where mismatches exist between content production and serving user needs.

Note: the chart is for illustrative purposes only, but it mirrors findings from many media operations that conduct content audits.

As you can see, doing the content audit, and subsequent analysis, can be a painstaking process. But it is of utmost importance. The insights from the audit forms the basis of every downstream decision.

User needs at the basis of strategy

Oliver shared how user needs now informs TBIJ’s content and engagement strategies, leading to even better journalism and growing audiences.

• More needs, better served: TBIJ tracks the volume of content it produces for each user need and identifies those that may be under-served. This informs content strategy, enabling them to act strategically to rebalance content production with user needs.
• Increase exposure of their investigations: certain themes and user needs are more accessible to specific target audiences than others. Reframing some investigative work around these creates more accessible entry points for more people.
• Increase engagement with their journalism: while certain user needs make good entry points, others suit deeper engagement or conversions. Understanding the user funnel through user needs, using tools like Poool’s Engage element, opens up possibilities for better-optimised user experiences.

User needs also became the basis for identifying both missed and new opportunities at TBIJ.

The “spark” user need has untapped potential, according to Oliver. To better inspire audiences about the impact good journalism can have, reframing this need so it more clearly guides TBIJ’s work may be on the cards.

This illustrates the evolving nature of user needs. It’s necessary to frequently revisit the model and iterate to remain close to audiences and aligned with the media operation’s purpose. Audiences’ needs, interests, behaviours, and the problems they face all change over time. And sometimes, it may be worth adjusting certain user needs to make them more actionable within newsrooms. The point is we must continually adapt to remain valuable.

Oliver also revealed that a fifth user need may be in the works at TBIJ – one that would be explicitly action-oriented. This speaks to extensive research showing that people seek information that helps them do something about what’s happening. There may well be an opportunity to serve this need by engaging people more directly with investigations, whether through participation or advocacy.

When user needs leads to culture change

Culture change can seem impossible – it’s hard and takes time. But at some point, it becomes inevitable.

Oliver knew TBIJ had reached this point when reporters started pitching ideas with user needs already in mind. No longer was user needs something they ticked off at the end of the process. Now, user needs directly shaped their journalism. Reporters were thinking about the “why” (need to serve) and “who” (target audience) of a story from conception.

“[Reporters] identified whether [their stories] would meet a need to inform, explain, inspire, or provoke action, and tailoring their approach accordingly. This not only produced stronger, more focused ideas, but also fostered a more collaborative editorial culture, where conversations about audience and impact became part of the creative process rather than an afterthought.”

This is the culmination of a user needs-first newsroom – where the virtuous cycle of value, quality, trust, and connection is fully activated to provide journalism that is genuinely valuable to people.

> Download all slides from Khalil & Oliver’s session here

What you'll get from this article:

> The root cause of slow teams: teams without clarity on organisational purpose struggle with unfocused discussions, overwhelming strategic possibilities, and difficulty prioritising.

> Key warning signs of purpose misalignment: including lack of clear articulation of what makes your organisation unique, vague mission understanding, and strategic decisions that miss key opportunities.

> The "work alone together" technique: a structured alternative to chaotic brainstorming meetings that generates more focused ideas by giving team members dedicated time to work independently before collaborating.

> A complete three-session alignment process: Session 1 aligns on users, problems, and competitive advantages; Session 2 identifies differentiators and decision-making principles; Session 3 prioritises the best approach using multiple evaluation lenses.

> The foundation hypothesis statement: or how to consolidate all team alignment into one powerful framework: "If we help [customer] solve [problem] with [approach], they will choose it over [competitors] because our solution is [differentiation]"

1. We are the facilitators of strategic vision

Audience practitioners and product-minded people get things done. More importantly, we get the right (strategic) things done and deliver value internally to colleagues and the broader business, and externally to people.

This is no mean feat. Especially in the media, an industry that is typically so hierarchical and where teams are so siloed.

The consequences of this structure are evident:

• Excessive hierarchy often impedes the flow of information within organisations, achieving the opposite of streamlining.
• Siloed functional teams create inevitable internal misalignment.

These factors breed strategic ambiguity throughout many media organisations.

Strategic ambiguity causes various problems:

• Lack of confidence in decisions: second-guessing of decisions by teams and others forces constant validation, which is inefficient.
• Resource allocation failures: pursuing multiple simultaneous goals spreads resources too thin, preventing breakthroughs in any area.
• People pulling in all directions: without seeing the bigger picture, teams work on overlapping or conflicting projects, stalling progress.

Thankfully, audience practitioners and product-minded people are stepping up as proactive leaders, bringing strategic clarity to media organisations.

This strategic clarity delivers important benefits:

• Amplifies impact by multiplying the effect of effort and resources through focus on high-leverage work.
• Reveals transformation opportunities by revealing novel ways to capitalise on challenges.
• Creates competitive advantage over the many organisations operating without strategic clarity.
• Unlocks sustainable growth, moving beyond tactical hacks to deliver consistent, long-term value to people.

Audience practitioners and product-minded people provide this strategic clarity through several means:

• Crystallising direction by translating vision into actionable strategies for teams. We align around clear problem statements rooted in the needs of audiences and ensure colleagues understand the strategic rationale.
• Implementing prioritisation frameworks that address the most critical issues. We focus on outcomes over outputs and use a systematic approach: collating ideas, rating them by impact-to-effort ratio, and creating roadmaps through collaborative discussion.
• Fostering organisational alignment around both decisions and decision-making processes. We manage key stakeholders by bringing decision-makers along early, explaining the “why,” maintaining transparency about tradeoffs, and genuinely addressing concerns.

The media organisations that truly value their audience practitioners and product-minded people are the ones reaping these rewards most abundantly.

2. We foster collaboration

Egos, siloes, woes: this toxic combination breeds strategic ambiguity and its associated calamities. The solution is creating strategic clarity, as we’ve seen. And audience practitioners and product-minded people deliver this through mastery of collaborative working.

Effective collaboration breaks down barriers across seniority levels, functional divisions, and other divides. Its not-so-secret ingredient is empathy – the ability to truly understand challenges from multiple perspectives.

Consider resistance to change. Rather than defaulting to frustration when facing opposition, audience practitioners and product-minded people dig deeper to uncover the real concerns:

• Loss of control: often interchanged with loss of power but also includes a threat to our sense of autonomy.
• Too much uncertainty: people tend to choose familiar misery over an unpredictable path.
• Too massive of a difference: when the change feels too big, people lose their bearings and the new normal feels impossible to navigate.
• Fear of losing face: people become defensive when what they worked on gets changed.
• Insecurity about competency: change can make people worry their skills are outdated – or worse, no longer needed.
• More work: change is too often linked to giving people even more work.
• Unintended consequences: the fallout may hit those who had nothing to do with the decision.
• The vibe is off: sometimes, they just don’t like you, sorry.

We excel at detecting these underlying concerns to inform collaborative work.

Audience practitioners and product-minded people systematically embed collaboration into organisational DNA through:

• Purpose-driven cross-functional teams that unite diverse talents (and perspectives) around shared goals. We assemble teams that work together physically, share objectives, and are rewarded by common outcomes. We maintain teams small initially (no more than 7-8 people) with regular touchpoints to ensure adequate support and alignment.
• Structured documentation processes like Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) that build credibility bridges between technical and non-technical groups. We implement review processes with peers to preserve strategic cohesion.
• Project frameworks that connect individual contributions to broader strategic objectives. We deploy design sprints and hackathons for problem-solving sessions.

By serving as collaboration catalysts, we don’t just facilitate better teamwork, we fundamentally transform how media organisations function – which gives them the strategic clarity they so desperately need.

3. We bring newsrooms closer to people

The media industry has grown too disconnected from the people we’re meant to serve. And we see the consequences all around us.

It would be naive to think that the rise of fascism, a loneliness epidemic, an increasingly fracturing web aren’t at least partly due to our failure to connect with people in a positive way.

Audience practitioners and product-minded people strive to rebuild this broken connection. We believe that truly serving people requires deeply understanding their needs, expectations, and problems. And then ensuring this understanding permeates into newsroom decisions.

Audience practitioners and product-minded people reconnect newsrooms with people in various ways:

• Championing perspectives of audiences: we build organisational empathy by democratising audience understanding across teams. We support colleagues to deepen their understanding of audiences with AI tools.
• Elevating audience value creation: we ensure that creating genuine value for people becomes central to every conversation – not just editorial discussions but also business strategy. We map content directly to the needs of different audiences, creating high-value content pillars.
• Anchoring product development in audience insight: we ground every product firmly in our understanding of real people – which we achieve through audience research – rather than building based on assumptions. We maintain internal research backlogs and help connect audience research to decision-making.

This systematic integration of audiences-informed thinking transforms both media organisations and the communities we serve, not least by enabling the creation of true content/product-audiences fit. The remarkable successes of newsrooms that implement the User Needs model – an audiences-informed way of creating content and experiences –demonstrates this approach’s power.

Here are a few ways in which newsrooms can better leverage audience practitioners and product-minded people:

• Empower us: get comfortable allocating us more resources while maintaining ROI accountability. Our influence delivers greater impact per dollar than most other investments.
• Support us: have our back, especially at the onset of projects. Your backing builds confidence – both ours and the organisation’s – resulting in quick wins and early momentum.
• Trust us: our work can take time to bear fruits. Embrace iterative experimentation and substantial longterm gains it produces.

By bridging the gap between newsrooms and people, we don’t just improve media business models, we help restore the essential social contract between journalism and society.

By facilitating strategic vision, fostering collaboration and bringing newsrooms closer to people, audience practitioners and product-minded people are defying the odds to breathe fresh air into an industry struggling for oxygen. The organisations that elevate these roles from peripheral to central will be the ones that not only survive but thrive. In an industry desperately in need of reinvention, we are the architects of a more sustainable, audiences-informed future.

Most media organisations struggle to tap into the creative potential of their entire staff. This guide presents a practical template that helps anyone in newsrooms come up with promising ideas and turn them into strategic solutions, breaking through traditional hierarchical barriers. In doing so, it can reshape organisational culture, creating an environment where each staff feels valued, heard, and empowered to contribute to meaningful innovation.

Many news organisations do offer staff opportunities to share their ideas – usually digital forms with submissions triaged by product managers or product-minded staff. However, these systems frequently result in high rejection rates, with most submissions being dismissed. While some view this as a marker of idea quality, the assumption that rejected ideas are inherently bad is fundamentally flawed.

Most ideas are not. Most ideas stem from genuine experience and intuition, but they often lack critical elements essential for organisational success.

Common reasons for idea rejection are:

• Lack of focus: the ideas are vague in scope with unclear expected outcomes.
• Misalignment with organisational priorities: it’s unclear how the ideas contribute to strategic objectives.
• Insufficient end-user consideration: value propositions are poorly-defined. This is especially prevalent in cases when submissions are from staff who are not the intended end-users.
• Resource underestimation: assessment of implementation requirements (for example, human hours needed) is inadequate.

These limitations create certain challenges: 

• Ineffective use of the organisation’s collective intelligence, which leads to fewer high-potential ideas, which leads to a smaller surface area for creative solutions.
• Erosion of trust in feedback mechanisms as staff perceive the exercise as ineffective.
• Diminished morale as staff feel little institutional appreciation for their ideas.

A template to collaboratively unlock and execute ideas

Product managers are uniquely positioned to address those challenges by socialising idea generation, design, development and even deployment.

Product managers have the skills to problem-solve in a strategic way, work across functions, create alignment, and more. They are also conscious that execution is fundamental – and that executing effectively and efficiently is enhanced by the right frameworks and templates.

Here, then, is a template I created for use by product managers in news organisations for this very use case.

The template is an adapted design sprint that gives staff visibility and agency over the design thinking process.

There are three sets of collaborative exercises which respectively create alignment about goals and key challenges to overcome, develop hypotheses for solutions, and validate the hypotheses with research.

People who have gone through the sprint come away with three main benefits:

• Alignment and focus. The sprint creates a shared understanding of objectives and problem-solving approaches. “The sprint helped us comprehend a problem more clearly and break down the solution into manageable chunks,” wrote a commissioning editor who went through the sprint.
• A repeatable system. The sprint converts abstract ideas into concrete requirements for strategic execution in a structured way. “I feel we will be able to integrate this streamlined approach to planning into all aspects of our work, not just this project itself,” a senior editor said.
• Collaborative empowerment. The sprint motivates staff and ensures equitable participation. Another senior editor said: “we all got a chance to contribute and feedback, it wasn’t dominated by more senior team members …”

Assembling a good team

Before you use the template, you need to assemble a team of half a dozen members or so. Your aim here is to form a team that will work collaboratively in a creative, productive and fulfilling manner.

There are three considerations to keep in mind as you assemble a team:

• Establish strategic alignment. It enables the team to move more quickly through the sprint without the need to rehash key decisions. And it ensures they are more focused on, and able to, deliver value to end-users. Having a certain desk or department department heavily represented in the team is one way of starting with some strategic alignment.
• Incorporate cross-functional expertise. The breadth of knowledge and perspectives is conducive to a cross-pollination of ideas, which puts the team in a position to execute holistic solutions. So, while the majority of your team might come from a certain desk or department, ensure you also have representatives from some other functional groups.
• Ensure team empowerment through stakeholder representation. There’s no point going through the sprint if any execution will be blocked by certain stakeholders. The team should be empowered to deliver. It is for this reason that bringing a decision-maker into the team can be valuable. They are typically more senior staff who may not have the bandwidth to go through the sprint. But ensuring they have visibility in the process and are kept informed about decisions should make it easier to get their backing, empowering the team.

Once you’ve assembled the team, you can start the sprint.

How to use the template

The product manager’s role is as a facilitator. They ensure that team members understand how to carry out each exercise, and how each exercise fits into the larger objectives of the sprint.

The exercises are ordered in eight rows. Most of those eight rows are the equivalent of 60- or 90-minute work sessions.

The first two sessions are all about finding alignment and focus for the sprint.

The first session is strictly focused on end-users.

• The first exercise  (Who are our users? Research) helps team members develop a shared understanding of end-users by sharing and reviewing any information they can find.
• The second exercise (Who are our users? Decision) then helps the team zero in on one target segment they want to be valuable to, using a decision-making matrix.

The second session aligns the team on why they’re doing this work, the challenges to overcome to be valuable to the target segment, and ultimately the scope of work during the sprint.

• The first exercise (What is the longterm goal of our work?) helps create a goal to aspire to.
• The second and third exercises (What are some of our possible challenges?; What are some key themes from our possible challenges?) identify challenges to overcome to reach the goal.
• The fourth exercise (What does the current experience look like?) recentres the team on the current state.
• The fifth exercise (What are the first steps we can take now itself?) helps identify what the team can work on during the sprint.

By this point, the team is clear on the long-term goal and the key challenges to work on. The team is now primed to move to develop hypotheses for solutions, which it will do over the third and fourth sessions.

The third session is all about idea generation. 

• The first exercise (What are our hypotheses?) encourages brainstorming of hypotheses for the identified challenges.
• The second exercise (Which hypothesis do we prioritise?) allows for prioritisation of hypotheses, using a prioritisation matrix.
• The third exercise (How are we defining success of the ideas?) establishes a criteria for hypothesis validation.
• The fourth exercise (What are some of the risks involved?) helps risk mitigation by encouraging the team to think through the assumptions and risks associated with the hypothesis.
• There are two additional exercises which the team can go through if it appears like they are favouring working on a prototype. The exercises are competitor research and heat map.

At the end of the third session, the team has clarity about the hypotheses they will work in an attempt to deliver value to the target segment.

The fourth session is concerned with planning the work. 

• The first exercise (What do we need to do to action the idea?) helps the team break down their big idea into a series of manageable jobs to be done. 
• The second exercise (When do we do what?) is roadmapping.
• The third exercise (Who does what?) is resource allocation.

The team is now ready to go and execute. Following execution, the team needs to decide whether they want to stop, iterate, or deploy what they’ve worked on or built. This decision relies on validating their big idea or hypothesis. To do this, the team needs to conduct research. This is covered by the fifth and sixth sessions.

The fifth session:

• For hypotheses that can be validated by looking at performance metrics, the first exercise of the fifth session (What do our metrics tell us about the idea?) allows comparison with a baseline.
• For more product-related work, user research is needed to validate hypotheses. In this case, the exercises help organise the research and set it for success.

The sixth session helps make sense of the output from the user research.

• The two exercises (What is the feedback from the user testers?; What can we learn from the user testing?) provide canvas for feedback capture and synthesis into actionable insights.

At this point, the team can make an informed decision about how to proceed with what they’ve worked on or built. If the research has not provided enough evidence that it is working, there is no shame in stopping and moving on to something else. (Some teams set fail criteria to help decision-making be more rational.) If the research has provided ample evidence that what they’ve worked on or built is working, the team can choose to iterate and eventually deploy at scale.

The seventh, and last, session (Does the prototype meet our standard?) is meant to act as a final internal check before deployment to reassure the team, and the wider organisation, that what the team worked or built is ready for the big time.

By following this structured approach, product managers can transform the idea generation process in their media organisations, creating a culture of innovation that values and leverages collective intelligence.

Which can in turn help shift the culture to one where creativity can flourish, staff feel heard, and meaningful innovations can emerge.

News organisations that want to deliver more value to their audiences now have a plug-and-play model they can use.

Dmitry Shishkin is back with an updated version of the user needs model, six years after posting his seminal article detailing six user needs. The updated model, user needs 2.0, so comprehensively maps people’s news needs that practically any news organisation can just use it off the shelf.

The user needs model essentially provides news organisations with a set of needs that most people have when they’re consuming news content. It is premised on the idea that news organisations can be more valuable to audiences by addressing their news needs better and more systematically.

The original model comprised six needs:

User needs work

The model works and that’s why it’s been so effective across many news organisations. It delivers more value to people. And it delivers more reach and user engagement for news organisations.

Views to BBC Russian content nearly tripled in five years as the newsroom focused more on the news needs of their audiences. At The Conversation, focusing on the news needs of young professionals led to a 45-50% increase in the portion of people who read whole articles and helped secure partnerships with other publishers including Fast Company, Público and others.

I suspect another big reason user needs has been so effective within newsrooms is that it doesn’t so much as solve problems many newsrooms face when they try to become more informed by their audiences as it negates them entirely.

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An argument I hear often as we support teams within The Conversation to become more audiences-informed is: “we’re just going to publish clickbait articles if we just listen to what people want”.

But familiarity with the user needs model has consistently assuaged this concern. Because the user needs model doesn’t condescend to journalists by minimising their journalistic intuition and expertise. It doesn’t tell them what they must commission. Instead, it augments the impact of their ideas and enables them to produce content that is even more valuable to people.

And once they see it in action, once they see how anchoring their ideas around relevant news needs supercharges the reach and impact of their work, journalists become advocates. ​​

At The Conversation, we started using user needs in 2020 with our UK newsroom to make its COVID coverage more valuable to people. The success of this project – despite our rather crude approach back then – has been eye-opening. We’ve since been deploying user needs across more teams to support them in becoming more audiences-informed.

User needs 2.0: “help me” and “connect me”

User needs 2.0 better captures people’s news needs today. The original model mapped people’s needs to know and understand what’s happening, and their need to be entertained or inspired.

But people are also looking for news content that they can use to do something, to take action. Over the years, audience research carried out by multiple news organisations has made this increasingly apparent. And this insight has informed the news needs that those organisations have looked to address with their journalism – from Vogue’s “make me feel responsible” to The New York Times’ “make my life easier” and The Conversation’s “motivate me”.

User needs 2.0 now incorporates this insight with the addition of two new action-driven user needs: “help me” and “connect me”.

“Help me” is more concerned with the personal. It is the need to find information that solves a problem, that details how to do that thing that will improve their lives.

“Connect me” is more societal in scope. It is the need to feel part of something bigger and act for the sake of not just themselves but others too. In one of our research with some of The Conversation’s climate readers, we kept hearing that they wanted to know more about what neighbouring communities were doing to mitigate or adapt to climate change. The need to be connected and to do something about the biggest crisis of our time was clear.

With the introduction of these two action-driven needs, this new model is comprehensive. It covers people’s needs to know, understand, feel and do. So comprehensive that the barrier for news organisations to implement user needs is now really low. Most news organisations can now just use the model without doing much user needs audience research of their own. The needs of their audiences is very, very likely to be represented in the new model.

Getting started with user needs

The user needs 2.0 model is detailed in a whitepaper just published by Shishkin and SmartOcto. An entire section of the whitepaper is devoted to implementing the model in newsrooms (addressing the “help me” need!).

It boils down to:

1. know your audience (at least a little bit) and determine their news needs
2. create a baseline to understand how well (or not) you’re addressing those news needs
3. start focusing on user needs to create more value to people

You can also read this detailed piece which explains how we implemented user needs with The Conversation’s UK newsroom.

The user needs model can be transformational. It’s an actionable model that helps news organisations elevate the power of their journalism and be more valuable to people. And the more valuable we are to people, the more they trust us, the more they come back to us. It’s a win-win. Implement it.

Download the full user needs 2.0 report here.

Khalil A. Cassimally is Head of Audience Insights at The Conversation, working with editorial, audience, data and engineering to bring more value to more people in more places.

This is the research-first approach to user research

Teams conduct the research first, then they attempt to make some sense out of all of the gathered data, then they try to tease out some of the information that may inform future work (to fix a user problem, perhaps).

This used to be our (the audience development team’s) approach to user research within The Conversation’s UK newsroom. And it was not ideal.

There are three main reasons why the research-first approach to user research is not ideal:

1. Few to no actions come out of the research. Because there are no real plans to take action – to create something – based on the data the research gathered. Teams may learn more about their users – great! – but then what? How are they using the new knowledge? What is the point of doing user research if nothing comes out of it?
2. Failure to collect the right data. Sometimes teams will be able to tease out some valuable information from the research. Only to realise that it’s not enough to properly inform future work. Here’s something that happened to us: we were analysing data collected from a survey and began to suspect that a particular audience segment became more engaged newsletter subscribers. So we set out to properly define that segment, only to realise that we didn’t have age group information. Turns out, the survey never asked respondents to select their age group. We failed to adequately define the segment because we didn’t collect the right data.
3. Collecting too much unnecessary data. Teams cast a wide net to collect as much data as they can. But at the end of the day, only a sliver of all collected data, if that, will hold some value. It’s a waste of resources for teams and also a waste of time for users.

What is the point of doing user research if nothing comes out of it?

The good news is: there is a better, and more efficient, approach to user research. One that is premised on informing actions. We’ve been using it for the past year. It’s the decision-first approach to user research.

The decision-first approach to user research

It’s essentially the research-first approach flipped on its head:

1. Make a decision first – determine what future work your team or organisation wants to do
2. Figure out the data that needs collecting to inform the decision
3. Select research methods that will gather the appropriate data

Here is an example of how we used the decision-first approach to user research

The Conversation is one of the most prolific publishers of climate content in the world. We publish 150-200 climate articles every month; the monthly viewership of our climate content is at least 2.5 million.

In the runup to COP26, a major UN climate summit in 2021, we asked ourselves: what is it that we can do for that audience? We figured this out at the decision layer.

Make a decision first

To determine what we wanted to do (what decision we wanted to make), we asked ourselves a few questions:

• What is the problem we want to solve for users?
• How can we solve that problem?
• Is this aligned with our business goals?
• Is this aligned with our mission?

And we came up with this decision:

We want to create content and/or products that address the needs of our climate readers so that our COP26 coverage is more valuable to them.

With the decision made, we needed to think about the data we would need to inform the decision – i.e. what information we needed to deliver the decision. We figured this out at the data layer.

Figure out the data that needs collecting to inform the decision

To determine what data we needed to inform the decision, we asked ourselves another set of questions:

• What are the needs of our climate readers?
• What is it that we need to show editors to inform their commissioning?

And we came up with this set of data that we would need to collect:

• List of needs of our climate readers
• Hierarchy of those needs
• How those needs are currently served by our climate coverage

So, we had a decision and we knew what data we needed to inform that decision. Our next step was to think about how to gather the data. We figured this out at the research layer.

Select research methods that will gather the appropriate data

To determine what research we needed to conduct to gather the necessary data, we asked ourselves yet another set of questions:

• How do we get a basic understanding of the needs of our climate readers?
• How do we know which needs are greatest and which needs are less great?
• How do we find out the extent to which our current coverage matches those needs?

And we came up with research methods specific to those data collection requirements:

• 1-1 interviews to get qualitative data about needs
• Survey to get quantitative data that enables ranking of needs
• Analytics to get quantitative behavioural data (in part to validate what survey participants told us)
• Manual tagging of climate articles to map content production to needs

By this point we had the decision, we knew what data we needed to collect to inform the decision, and we knew what research to conduct to collect the data.

Therein lies the power of the decision-first approach to user research. With the decision-first approach, user research does not have to cast a wide net in the hope of getting some valuable information. Instead, the research is in the service of the data … and the data is in the service of the decision (our success). In other words, user research becomes focused on gathering data that will inform actions.

The decision-first approach ensures that user research is in the service of our success. User research becomes focused on gathering data that will inform actions.

We conducted the research and here were some of our findings:

• 1-1 interviews revealed that our climate users had four key needs: educate me, give me perspective, keep me on trend and motivate me.
• The survey revealed that ‘motivate me’ was the greatest need, followed by ‘educate me’.
• Analytics revealed that what survey participants told us about their needs matched what they were reading on the site.
• Tagging of climate articles revealed a mismatch between content production and user needs. While ‘motivate me’ was the greatest need, it was also the most underserved by our coverage.

Here’s how those findings informed our decision, including two key products:

Our climate editors published more ‘motivate me’ type content such as guides and solutions journalism. Interest in those stories was, as expected, very high.

We relaunched our weekly climate action newsletter to further serve the ‘motivate me’ need. Our Imagine newsletter deep-dives in one climate issue every week, covering it with a solutions lens. Imagine is now one of The Conversation’s topic-specific newsletters with most subscribers.

We also designed and launched an entirely new landing page to package our COP26 coverage. This product served the ‘keep me on trend’ need by making our latest COP26 coverage easily accessible in one place. The landing page also acted as a lead page for Imagine. It had a conversion rate of 10% at one point, which is the highest conversion rate ever recorded across The Conversation.

Our move from the research-first to the decision-first approach to user research has made our research process more efficient, unlocked the collection of more valuable data, and informed multiple products. All the resources and time we devote to user research now leads to collecting data that inform decisions … decisions that bring added value to our users and help us deliver on our business goals.

This article is based on a masterclass Khalil gave as part of INMA’s series on how to build customer-informed products. Find more of Khalil’s work on Linkedin.