Meeting Maslow: Six Rules Of Product Design Informed By Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are familiar to anyone who hit the Psychology 101 class in college. In essence, it’s a roadmap for human development - but what’s crucial about the theory is that individuals can’t be satisfied at any additional level until the needs of the previous level have been fully met.

It goes like this:

Physiological needs (food, water, warmth),

Security needs (safety and security)

Belongingness and love (friends and relationships)

Esteem needs (prestige and accomplishment)

Self-actualization (realizing one’s full potential)

Maslow was one of the first to recognize the contingency of later needs rested on the stability of earlier ones - and in doing so built a hierarchy for human potential that has been widely adopted.

Maslow and Product Design

How does this apply to product design? Well, products must be multifunction - from functionality to aesthetics, they have to meet multiple layers of customer demand to be fully actualized. It’s going to look something like this

Functionality
Reliability
Usability
Proficiency
Creativity

For product designers, this presents a valuable roadmap for the stages of product design. Let's take a look at the stages of this hierarchy more closely.

1) Functionality

 Just like humans need their physiological needs to be met for any further development, a product has to tick off one box before anything else - it needs to work. This is a rule product designers often forget, enthusiastically innovating aesthetic and modern designs, and leaving functionality as an afterthought.

The value in a product comes from its functionality. “In order to achieve functionality as a platform for further product development, designers should be using customer research to find out exactly how a product will be used,” says Harold Johnson, a product design blogger at Assignment Help and Essay Services. “This will ensure it meets the standards of use that will be applied to it.”

2) Reliability

 For Maslow, after a human’s physiological needs were met they’d pursue safety and security as the next platform from which to build an identity. And customers are looking for security too - they need to trust a product works when and where they choose to use it.

From this truth we receive reliability as the next stage in a hierarchy of product design. Once designers are confident their product has found functionality, they should seek to ensure that functionality is reliable. Reliability is created through testing - simulating the conditions of use your product is likely to put under in the real world. So test, test test before moving on.

3) Usability

 Once you have built a product that works, and works reliably, you can move on to exploring the details of how a product is used. Usability is a separate value to functionality - a higher level concept that requires functionality inherently, but can be lacking in functional products.

Simplifying the way your product is used will enable your customers to get more out of the product. If your product can’t be simplified, thinking about the instructions that come with it as a way of promoting usability is vital. The instructions of a product should never come secondary to its development, but rather be built in tandem with usability.

4) Proficiency

 You’re beginning to build a really good product, with a strong foundation of functionality and an infrastructure of reliability and usability. For Maslow, the fourth stage is the esteem needs  - conceptual psychological desires of the individual and, for product designers too, the fourth stage is conceptual.

“Proficiency is about the way users interact symbiotically with a product to allow user experience to grow and unfold,” says James Matthews, a business writer at UKWritings and Revieweal. “Will your users get better at using your product with time, allowing them to strengthen a relationship between the product and their lifestyle?” Think about how else your product could be used and the way it evolves throughout its lifespan.

5) Creativity

 Once a certain number of previous conditions have been met, we as humans can move towards complete actualization of our potential. For many product designers, there’s no shift to thinking about creativity - a product is deemed adequate once the previous four stages have been achieved. But an innovative product with multiple uses and creatively designed functions will have a longer lifespan in the market. Fully actualize your products.

Wrapping Up

 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been revolutionary because of its simplicity - the linear model of development is easily followed and understood. In product design, simplicity is a powerful but often neglected value - let Maslow inspire your product road map and you’ll create fully actualized products that make a splash on the market.