In this week’s lecture, we were introduced to the Design Hierarchy of Need, which is based upon the Hierarchy of Need, coined by Abraham Maslow.
The Design Hierarchy of Need places design features into five categories based upon their importance. The order of categories, from most essential to least, reads: functionality, reliability, usability, proficiency, and creativity.
As part of my lecture, I’ve analysed an injection tracker application by CrioSoft LLC, which is available in the Apple App Store, applying the principles of the Design Hierarchy of Need, which is pictured above. I assessed the current features and placed them in the categories according to how fundamental I believe they are to the product.
To go one step further I’ve also considered some potential features that I might include as updated if I was a developer of the application.
In practice, the Design Hierarchy of Need is useful because developers can focus on achieving features that are in the functionality, reliability, and usability categories of the scale first. This would allow them to distribute their application to the public for testing and even potentially begin developing a revenue stream from it before completion. From there they could continue working on less essential features while the application is live, feeding these to users via incremental updates.
I hope to make use of this knowledge in a future module. I definitely plan on either creating a website or an application at some point during the course. I imagine that as each module is only 12 weeks long I will not be able to create a fully-featured final outcome. I will likely need to make and justify decisions in terms of which features are created first, and which features are seen as required before the submission deadline.