The Hard Work Lies Ahead
(If You Want It)
Steve Portigal

Portigal Consulting | [e-mail]

 

Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” from 1943 is a well-known psychological framework that has been applied (directly, or through derivative versions) to thousands of diverse problems. Our work often brings us back to his hierarchy as we consider addressing a richer set of needs through the stuff we are making. And while I like to look at and think about people more than stuff, I feel as though we’ve come to a point where we are not thinking hard enough about the “stuff.” It’s high time to leverage this style of hierarchy to challenge the types of user experiences we’re enabling with the stuff we’re making.

I challenge all of us in design,
marketing, and research (and
beyond) to consider these ques-
tions as instrumental to new
product development:
• Can it be used without physi-
cal distress?

• Can it be used easily (i.e., without frustration or other immediate emotional distress?)

• Does it bring new experiences and capabilities into people’s lives?

• Does it improve society?

answer to this question of physical distress, then, depends on what part of the lifecycle we consider.

Can It Be Used Without
Physical Distress?
While ergonomists will continue
to advocate for greater aware-
ness of the physical risks from
our various devices, it seems like
we’re doing pretty well. We can
sit in front of computers, stare
at displays of all sizes, type and
text, and plug things into our
ears without most of us abrad-
ing, bleeding, or aching too badly.
Most readers of this publica-
tion live in a geographic setting
where government regulations
offer some expectation of injury-
free product usage. There will
always be quality-control issues
(such as the occasional spate of
exploding laptop or iPod batter-
ies), but we enjoy a fairly high
standard of safety as primary
users of devices.

Can It Be Used Easily?

The other day, I was flying Virgin America. As we were preparing to take off, the flight attendants told us about their “award winning” in-flight entertainment system. Meanwhile, I was watching a man in the row in front of me trying to use it. He had his credit card out and couldn’t master the swipe gesture. He pushed soft keys and hard keys, and he took his card in and out of his wallet. He was utterly lost—even if he had swiped properly, he was not even at a place in the transaction flow where the system was looking for a swiped card. I was tempted to page the flight attendant for him, because he was never ever going to be able to complete even the most basic task like paying for a movie.

We in the UX community are always gathering those stories, and we have some belief that with our usability testing and our agile-waterfall-scrum-hoosits that this sort of thing happens only when the culture is bad, or the process is bad, or the leadership is bad, or the company doesn’t care or whatever. But really, it’s far worse than that.

The truth we don’t want to face is that most of the tech-

November + December 2010