Understanding and Prioritizing Users Needs

As a designer, it is our responsibility to apply the design thinking process effectively and ensure that we have an empathetic and thorough understanding of the user needs. The following diagram explains a typical design thinking stages for web and mobile applications development:

As you might have guessed, for the ideation, prototyping, and testing, it is important to have well-defined requirements, and very importantly, we do need to decide what all requirements need to be prioritized and when. The business may not have unlimited money, and even if they have sufficient money, they would like to see a few things getting done ahead of others.

That is where Maslow's law becomes supercritical. While there are two versions of Maslow's law of hierarchy of needs, I include the more expanded version (with 8-level rather than 5-levels) in this article.

As you can see that each need kind of builds on the others. There is no point in trying to fulfill the needs higher up when the fundamental needs (the deficiency needs) have not been met. That is where, as a product designer, it is okay to think in terms of MUP/MVP and deliver experiences in a way that it becomes sustainable and ensure success.

Prioritization

Call it MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or MUP (Minimum Usable Product) or whatever sounds reasonable to carve out a logical piece of work; the point is that we do need to fulfill the more fundamental needs first. You do need to list the requirements and rank them in the order of their need as per the hierarchy and then use the mathematical models to decide what to consider now and what can be deferred for later.

That brings down to understanding the Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability by considering the users as well as the stakeholders and their business plan.

If you guessed desirability to be tightly linked with the hierarchy of needs, then you may not be wrong at all. It is just that as a designer, we don't often categorize requirements based on the hierarchy of needs. We many times go based on some small sample data, which may mislead in terms of the desirability of a given feature. Careful consideration at this stage will make a significant difference.

What happens when you don't get the right priority?

Well, the answer is obvious; it results in wastage of resources. If not absolute failure, then at least significant inefficiency will be there. Also, it is evident that when the more fundamental needs are not met, then one or more of the following will happen.

• The user may not adopt the product.
• Building the complex feature will require a lot of unproven assumptions, and thus it will introduce risks.
• The overall cost of building the application will become more expensive.

Conclusion

The quality of the understanding of the requirements; the actual business need; is critical for the quality UX design and prototype. Further, if the requirements are partially delivered (which is rare and becoming rarer), or the delivery is not as per the fundamental needs of the users, then naturally, the adoption suffers. This article touches upon understanding the actual needs and prioritizing them for the best possible outcome.

References

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs