Hierarchy of user needs

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Inspired by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Products should meet user needs of a lower level before moving up higher in the hierarchy.

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User goals

Products must fit the user's use case or problem to solve for them to try your product.

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Understanding

Product marketing and documentation must clearly articulate what the product does, use cases, and value proposition. Users need to understand product value to trying the product.

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Usability

Users should have a seamless experience from sign-up to post-production. Every friction point adds to the probability of users dropping-off.

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Delight

Products should add delight in the lower levels, but it is not meaningful until the lower levels have been attained.

Set expectations and
give consistent feedback

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With reports it is important to set expectations and align on both company and career goals. Ambiguity in expectations leads to inefficiencies, mis-understandings and frustration.

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Timely, consistent, positive and constructive feedback is critical for reports to understand where they are excelling and where growth is needed. Performance feedback once or twice a year is not enough, and when those do happen, the feedback should not be surprising as there has been regular feedback loops.

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Focus on business outcomes

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Design organizations are most impactful when they are aligned with business goals and outcomes. When business goals and strategy are clear, design can play an integral role by quantifying the impact of user-focused projects on company-wide key performance indicators.

Data driven design

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Quantitative and qualitative data are necessary to guide design decisions and help determine user impact. If the impact is negative, research can help understand where and why problems occur and inform solutions.

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Prioritize and communicate

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To ensure that we are efficiently doing the most impactful work, we have to consistently communicate with stakeholders to align on priorities, give status updates and update timelines and milestones.

Understand and use the product

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It is often surprising how many people do not use the product they are building, from engineers to product managers to designers. Understanding and using the product is critical to developing user empathy and getting a broader understanding of the feature you are building.

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As one of the onboarding tasks for new members on my teams, they are tasked with doing a heuristic evaluation using the product to do key user journeys.

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