After doing a Ctrl-F for "need" and not finding any distinction between needs and wants, I'm wondering if you understand what a human need is and if this book helps uncover actual needs versus things that aren't needs.
I'm afraid your comment here has broken both the HN site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Can you please follow the rules in the future? We want HN to be a place where people's work can be discussed respectfully and substantively. There's plenty of room for asking questions, offering critiques, and so on, but we don't want a putdown culture of trying to make others look like idiots. There's enough of that elsewhere on the internet.
I agree that discussing that distinction [ed: between needs and wants] can make sense. Since the book does not use the concept of needs as an abstract concepts (“what is a Need”) nor as research device (“What are your needs?”) I did not discuss it. Fittingly, if you Ctrl+F for "want" you will not find it being use as a research concept either (There are a lot of "wants" in regards to researcher activities as in "You want to do X after Y")
Their critique might've been helpful/valid if approached correctly, I don't know. I do know that Ctrl+F'ing through a 30K+ word book in search of the word "need" in order to call out the absence of some very specific thing they decided is essential, without actually reading the book, seems to me like idle sniping and not a genuine critique. It comes across as peevish and snarky.
To the OP, the book looks interesting and I've started reading it from the top. FWIW btw, it loads very quickly on my end.
I'd think that sort of thing would be in a section on feature prioritization or scoping an MVC. I don't see a section like that in the toc, and it feels like it would be rather out-of-scope for what this is about. Not that I've finished reading the whole thing in detail yet.
Yes, I deliberately avoided to put feature prioritization or even personas or Jobs-To-Be-Done in the book — there are too many ways to do this and it is of no use if I write about one and the team/PM/company prefers another.
"Need" vs "want" is a false dichotomy. It's actually a spectrum, and there's no single obviously correct position to split it at to reduce to a binary.
