Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs for developing products

How ideas from psychology & sociology can be used to develop and market products.

You can always transplant ideas and concepts. Ideas are patterns that give you a glimpse of how life operates. If they work in one situation, they would most likely work in another. This is the core essence of innovation. Look for the patterns that make things work. Then apply the same patterns in places where you would least expect to find it. Here is a pattern that works in sociology and can just as easily be adapted to developing and marketing products.

Maslow’s Hierarchy — in a new context

Most of you would be familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This is a classic theory that can be easily adapted into product design and development.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid with the largest, most fundamental needs at the bottom and the need for self-actualization and transcendence at the top. In other words, the crux of the theory is that individuals’ most basic needs must be met before they become motivated to achieve higher level needs.

When you are developing software products (or any product, for that matter) you always start with listing our requirements. This is what matters the most to users and inherently we understand this.

Since this is the very basic action, within the framework of Maslow’s Hierarchy:

Physiological needs = Product functionality.

If you are operating in a market where there is no other alternative to your product in terms of functionality, users will be ready to use the product even if it does not offer any other compelling reason.

Say you want to dig a hole and these are the three products available in your market.

Even if the shovel available is a small basic one you would still go for it.

Now imagine if the shovel market were to change to something like this:

This is where it gets more complicated and Maslow’s other levels come into play.

After functionality in the product hierarchy, people look at trust and stability. So a strong shovel with good quality is the next thing they would look for.

Safety = Trust and Stability

However if you think after this the next leap would be to look for more functionality, you would be mistaken. The next thing users look for is social validation.

This is why something like a Power Shovel is not used much. There is no social validation.

So the next level a product needs to achieve is:

Belonging = Social Validation

Once you have social validation you can add on other factors like the experience (a power shovel will work at this stage) and other user experience features. This is where design comes in.

Esteem = Experience

Finally comes the self actualisation, and this is where the user actually becomes better as a result of using the product. I don’t have an example for this in the Shovel market, but a product like a Mac or Nike Shoes fit this level of product evolution. Thus:

Actualisation = Pride

This is how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs works in product development. You can use this to evaluate at what stage your product is at and thus prioritize the features accordingly. Also you can compare your competition and your own product in terms of how well it maps on this hierarchy. If your competition checks off more levels on the scale, then you will have to work harder to make your user choose you over the competition. If you are higher on the scale, you can decide to go to market faster and thus gain strategic advantage of time.

These are a few ways in which you could use a concept from sociology to work in product design.