Humans love metaphors

Humans at large, and user experience designers especially, are great fans of metaphors. These devices give us the ability to capture complex concepts into bite-sized and memorable chunks, helping those outside complex thought-work quickly grasp and convey the purpose of a design or practice. Taking common-knowledge or experiences and redefining them into visual and conceptual packages also makes great fodder for presentations and one’s personal brand.

Sometimes, however, metaphors can explicitly or implicitly convey an idea such that it has negative implications on the process it was trying to convey. This takes us to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — and the pyramid that represents those needs, co-opted by user experience designers to represent complex and cohesive system design. But do those pyramids help — or hurt — our understanding of what defines a complete system?

Maslow’s pyramid: the hierarchy of needs

One of the more ubiquitous symbols of user experience design in recent years is the redefined hierarchy of needs pyramid. The original pyramid comes out of Abraham Maslow’s psychological explanation of human needs, presenting a look at what motivates human behavior predicated on the concept that each level of motivation is dependent on the layer below.

Maslows hierarchy of needs pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Each layer of the pyramid represents a motivation. But higher layers of motivation are irrelevant without first satisfying a layer below. For the “Physiological” layer, Maslow considers motivators such as hunger, sleep deprivation, and other essential physical needs. For the “Safety” later, Maslow considers needs such as personal and financial security. At the top of the pyramid is the concept of self-actualization: a focus on becoming your full potential. Until you are no longer in the throws of hunger, your motivation will be limited to the first level of the pyramid — individuals who are starving have little time for philosophical consideration of their true purpose in life.

The pyramid and user experience

Maslow’s own pyramid is not without criticism — is the starving man not also concerned with his true potential? Are we so base as to be only motivated by an absence in the stomach? Regardless, this hasn’t prevented designers from redefining the pyramid of needs towards complex systems and their goals / execution. And rethink the pyramid they have!

The personal Giza of user experience pyramids from Newman Lanier, http://abetteruserexperience.com/2011/12/hierarchy-of-needs-the-deprecated-pyramid/

The forms of these pyramids are myriad but seem to have a few defining characteristics, whether explicitly in their definition or implicitly in their form:

Each pyramid attempts to explain the essential elements of a fully developed system in terms of user experience

in terms of user experience Almost all present a hierarchical view of achievement of each level: Before a system can be meaningful to a user it must first have a base of functionality

of achievement of each level: Before a system can be meaningful to a user it must first have a base of functionality Each present a stratified view of the concerns of a system: usability as markedly separate from the achievement of desirability, and never the two should cross

Topple the pyramid

As you may already be seeing, there are some problems in what these features represent. Most unfortunate of these challenges are designers and product owners viewing the top layers of the pyramid as “unobtainable,” a “someday” concern. If we do not provide a great base of functional and reliable features first, there’s no way to reach emotional design. Emotional design is so high up — that’s not something we need in this product’s design.

Scott Kerr has a great illustration of the right and wrong way to scale up the pyramid to produce a sticky product people will love and want to use:

As is obvious at a closer glance, but not intuitive at a first review, a pyramid purports to fill the base of a design first. With Scott’s illustration, focusing on less functionality, that optimizes the edges, is usable, evokes positive emotions… can be a much stronger way to scale the pyramid.

Swirl the pyramid

If focusing on reaching the higher eschelons of the pyramid is important, so too is recognizing that the layers of the pyramid are not layers at all, but rather mutually supporting and reinforcing elements. A highly functional product can inherently invoke emotion in the user. When users are in a highly engaged state they can see the product as more functional. Better than a pyramid would be a swirling whirlpool wherein all elements of a complete system support and reinforce one another. Where there are flaws, users can forgive if other higher elements are present (I may not have feature X, but this system makes doing Y so fast and fun, I cannot live without it!)

A ux whirlpool http://boxesandarrows.com/ux-design-planning-not-one-man-show/

User experience, as Newman Lanier states, is a “super system”, a complex interaction of multiple facets of quick wins, endearing copy and moments, functionality and reliable, trust-worthiness, beauty, aesthetics, speed and user growth over time. These systems evolve, and reorder based on usage and needs. They are not a staid pyramid.

User experience isn’t a pyramid

Many additional posts could be written on all the metaphors of user experience design — the cupcake, building a tricycle over a car, and all the ways to represent MVP products. In themselves, metaphors can be great ways to generate excitement, to provide ways for individuals new to user experience to conceptualize and discuss important features of your practice and product.

Still, let’s not be constrained as we are to the pyramid. I hope it’s clear that it is worthy of a challenge to ensure that the lopsided, swirling view of a complete product also hits your stakeholders — less you have a great bucket of features with no reliability, no usability, no emotion, and no actualization.

Looking at you Microsoft Word.

See also