Day 14 of 100: How I designed a Countdown Timer using the “Design Hierarchy of needs”
An experiment using Steven Bradley’s Design Hierarchy of needs.
I welcome myself back to the 100 days of UI challenge after sometime off due to lots of commitments and tried to avoid being under too much pressure in delivering the designs — I am not just posting design concepts but I try as much as possible to let you know how they came to be. I do hope you understand, apologies :) To God be the Glory, I had an amazing first UX design talk last week. See presentation slide and musings :)
Today’s challenge was to design a countdown timer and as I was thinking about it, I stumbled upon a concept — Design Hierarchy of Needs, by Steven Bradley that I doodled on one of my books. I decided to design the countdown timer based on the concept.
Steven based his idea on the heavily criticized Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory in psychology that tries to describe the stages of human growth and need. The theory says that man has to satisfy his basic needs before any consideration to satisfy the high level needs.
You can go through the interesting article on “design hierarchy of needs” on Smashing Magazine by Steven Bradley, but I will give you context here too.
So with that, Steven proposed a “Design hierarchy of needs” and said that
based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the idea of a design hierarchy of needs rests on the assumption that in order to be successful, a design must meet basic needs before it can satisfy higher-level needs. Before a design can “Wow” us, it must work as intended. It must meet some minimal need or nothing else will really matter.
So when designing a product, one has to make sure that they really understand what they are building, know the users, do lot’s of design thinking and come up with a design that only meets the basic functional needs of the intended user which is the lowest level in the hierarchy of needs, followed by being reliable, usable, proficient and finally the icing on the cake — which everybody wants to attain — a uniquely designed product that the whole world will use.
Level 5: Creative ( great innovation, aesthetic beauty, design perceived to be of the highest level )
Level 4: proficient ( empowers people to do more and be better, design perceived to be of high level )
Level 3: Usable ( design is easy to use and understand, design perceived to be of moderate value )
Level 2: Reliable ( works consistently and performance very key, design is of very low value here )
Level 1: Functional ( design works to meet basic functional expectations, not different from other apps in the market, design of little value ).
So after experimenting I created the Countdown timer accordingly.
Functionality level
App meets basic functionality, which is to start and stop the countdown timer. Nothing fancy, not much attention on the visuals, or advanced user options. Here, anybody can ‘cook up’ an app like this. So meeting basic functionality can’t differentiate you in the market.
Reliability
I did not put up any design for reliability for it would demand more screens to show the flow. But here we measure things like — performance, crash rate, if time counts down correctly, does the timer stop and restart properly, does clicking on reset actually reset the timer, or does it exit the app etc.
Usability level
How we measure the ease of use of the countdown design, timer setup, check if basic things needed by a countdown app beyond the “start/stop” and “time” as shown in the functionality level is met. We also check things like — can the user add time, reset timer, stop, start, pause timer with less difficulty.
Proficient level
How can we empower users to do more? Texts changed to easily recognizable icons, and a label ( Sprint time) was added for users to setup multiple countdowns for various reasons, We added structure for UI elements, and fixed them tightly on the screen. It’s also easy on the eyes.
Creativity Level
So based on the proposed hierarchy of needs, one only attains this level after caring much about the low level concerns first. Here, we added the icing on the cake which is a far better design — aesthetic wise. Every designer wants to get to this level. The concept is an “empty water reservoir” that fills up as the time counts down.
My Sketch App workspace showing all levels
Do I agree with Stephen Bradley’s Design Hierarchy of needs?
I will say, not exactly because a design process should not be this static, and the levels should all be interchangeable and the “creative spark” can kick start from any level. Creativity for instance can be applied at every stage of problem solving, but here it was reserved as just an added advantage. In all, this is a great resource, for designers to know the exact things to care about when designing especially beginners like me.
PS: Note that this approach asks other relevant user questions just like any design challenge.
reference
Designing For A Hierarchy Of Needs By Steven Bradley
Thank you for the time and please, recommend if you like this.
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