5 Dimensions of Customer Need+Desire
Working on personas last year I was struck by how task-focused the goals I included were - it was a really impoverished view of these people as real people. Real people don’t have goals that are exclusively focused on the system I’m designing, and I felt it was arrogant not to acknowledge the richness of their motivations and the reality of the different dimensions of hopes, needs, dreams, and desires in their lives.
So I started to think about what other kind of motivators and goals can help me to truly know a customer, and came to Maslow’s hierarchy as a good starting point to look at the varying goals, instead of simply feeling like task-based activities were the be all and end all. That lead to the model here, which doesn’t mirror Maslow, but crosses different dimensions of goals. It helps in my thinking about how well a product fits those goals, with a visual conceit of receptors accomodating different goals across dimensions.