s4h-design-user-needs

s4h-design-user-needs is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 80 tokens per session (1,527 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A user-research method for separating what people ask for from the underlying problem they are trying to solve. It uses jobs-to-be-done, a way to describe the practical task a person hires a product or service to complete.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to clarify product problems, understand user research, distinguish stated, observed, and hidden needs, and define what a design should solve.
Why use it?
People often suggest a solution instead of clearly describing their need, so following the request literally can lead to building the wrong thing.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to clarify product problems, understand user research, distinguish stated, observed, and hidden needs, and define what a design should solve.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-user-needs
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-design-user-needs
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for s4h-design-user-needs

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-user-needs/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-user-needs)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-user-needs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-user-needs/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for s4h-design-user-needs

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-user-needs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-user-needs.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,527 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00080 $0.01527
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.00763
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00305
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00153

Measured 12d ago against content hash f84b32b25a4c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-design-user-needs scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/s4h-design-user-needs/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design: User Needs

The most common design failure is building the wrong thing well. People don't articulate needs — they articulate solutions. "I want a faster horse," "I need a bigger inbox," "give me more options." These are requests framed as solutions to problems the user hasn't quite stated. A designer who takes them at face value will build a faster horse, a bigger inbox, more options — and miss the underlying need entirely.

Clayton Christensen's jobs-to-be-done framework makes the shift explicit: people don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. Understanding the job — not the product request — is the designer's actual brief. Don Norman extended this with the distinction between stated needs (what people say), observed needs (what people do), and latent needs (what people don't yet know they need but would recognise immediately if you showed them). All three matter. Only one of them is given to you directly.

This skill works through all three levels, using structured inquiry to separate the real need from the stated proxy and surface the design target that actually matters.


Your Process

Step 1: State the Request Write down exactly what was asked for, in the words it was stated. Preserve the phrasing — the precise language reveals how the person is framing the problem.

Framing check: Confirm the request and the context in which it arose before continuing. State what you've identified — the stated request and the situation it comes from — in one sentence, then use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "I'm reading this as: [your one-sentence framing of the request and its context]. Is that right?"
  • Header: "Framing"
  • Options:
    • Yes — proceed — framing is correct
    • Adjust — one element is off; user will correct it before you continue
    • Reframe — different situation than read; incorporate the correction before proceeding

Step 2: Decompose the Job Apply jobs-to-be-done decomposition. For the stated request, identify:

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 120 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A f84b32b25a4c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-design-user-needs is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 1,527 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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