How Human Needs Impact Design: A Guide for Success
Humans are driven by motivations based on needs – these needs are the foundation of how and why we tend to react or think a certain way. To successfully design for human behaviour, figuring out what motivates people is the most important factor.
Have you ever paused to consider the thoughts and motivations of the person sitting across from you? Are they concerned about earning enough money to feed their family? Are they trying to find a way to outperform you and raise their self-esteem? Do they just want to have fun and work together with you?
More often than not, the answers to such seemingly simple questions are much more complex than you might expect. To figure out how to design for human needs, we first need to understand what these needs are and where they come from.
Three types of human needs
At TPA, we begin with the theory that humans have three types of needs: basic, psychological, and self-fulfilment needs.
These needs can be coupled to the Triune Brain described by Paul D. MacLean, which identifies three types of human brains: reptile, limbic system, and neocortex. These different brain classifications evolved over time according to human development, with the reptilian brain being the oldest and the neocortex being the newest. The more basic a need is (e.g. the fight or flight instinct, needing food and warmth), the deeper it’s embedded in our brain as it is more essential for survival.
In a similar fashion, human basic needs are the foundations for survival and take priority over psychological or self-fulfilment needs.
The basics of basic needs
The very basic needs of any creature include staying alive and safe. As humans, we broaden this category to social constructs like wanting to be both physically safe and financially secure.
Basic needs are about having control over the basic necessities of your life. People vary in the level of control they require or want to have (some people are risk takers whilst others prefer to play it safe), but humans will stress out and go into a defensive or attack mode if their individual measures of control are not met.
The human basic needs can be split into two categories:
Physiological needs are about being physically well. Do I have enough food and water? Do I have a warm shelter to rest under? Depending on the amount of luxury we are personally used to, the point of fulfilment for this need changes.
Safety needs are all about creating a safe environment for your user. Users not only want to feel secure physiologically in the future, they also want to know that they will be able to continue living at their current standards, won't receive harm, and can remain healthy for a long time. Products that play into this need can have an inflexible price as every human will want and need it.
Levelling up to psychological needs
Psychological needs are less essential but still need to be well-guarded as they impact how we feel about ourselves. These needs guard you from yourself and subtle dangers in the world. A lot of addictive applications and products in current design tend to play on psychological needs as they are subconscious enough to be targeted without a user's knowledge, but will not impact a user's healthy life.
Psychological needs can also be split into two categories:
1. Love and belonging are about creating deep connections and strong, lasting relationships. It's about building trust with specific people, then feeling connected with and accepted by them. Humans are designed to want to feel a certain level of love, and such deep links help us to feel happier and less stressed.
2. Esteem lies more in the realm of creating an identity for yourself and being able to reflect this towards the group. Humans are herd animals and feel pressured to stick with the herd. To ensure our survival and avoid getting kicked out or left behind by the herd, humans boost our (self-)esteem and value to the herd by attaining achievements, self-respect, respect for others, status, dominance, etc.
Self-fulfilment needs are the cherry on top
Once our survival through social needs has been established, we can begin to look at ourselves once again. Self-fulfilment, or self-actualisation needs target personal growth and accomplishing our goals or fullest potential.
Be aware that we can only build ourselves and our skills (without feeling the need to reflect it towards others or the group) after successfully covering our basic and psychological needs.
Although every human is always trying to reach the self-fulfillment state, and society likes to pretend that it lets us achieve this state, it is a very rare state to be in. It's also impossible to focus only on personal growth as a product design driver. The key rule for designers is to always place every other need first. The rest is a bonus cherry on top.
This short overview of human needs will help you to grasp how and why users think of or react towards certain things. In our next article, we'll dive deeper into how we can design for human needs and how to stimulate these needs to drive users.
