How to put well-being at the center of product design
We developed a method to design for people’s deeper needs.
Is your product made out of wire or cloth?
This may sound like a ridiculous question; however, I believe it holds the key to humanizing the products in our lives.
This question references Harlow’s Monkey Love Experiment. In this experiment, monkeys were given a choice between a wire mother that dispensed milk (right), and a snuggly one made of cloth (left). Understandably, baby monkeys significantly preferred the snuggly one — despite the overt functional utility of the “wire mother.”
Wouldn’t you? I, for one, need a little “snuggly cloth” as I go through life.
I believe this analogy is emblematic of how many companies create products today. They create wire products that reduce people to mere “users” and only meet their functional needs. And they differentiate their products by seeking to provide more functional utility than the competition. (I.e. launching more features/services that solve more unmet needs/pain points/jobs/problems.)
I once heard a well-known innovator sum this approach up by saying, “Innovation is easy. If someone has tennis elbow, figure out a way to fix their tennis elbow.”
What those companies seem to ignore is that we have far deeper needs than this. I suppose if you zoom in, we are just customers trying to fix functional problems. But if you zoom out, each of us is whole human — trying to make the most out of our limited time here by living a good life.
The companies that understand this create cloth products that consciously support people at a deeper level and leave them stronger, happier, and more fulfilled. This transforms their relationship with customers/users and unlocks deeper differentiation.
For example:
Spotify seems to understand that, at a deeper level, we’re on a lifelong journey to understand who we are. That’s why features like Discover Weekly and Wrapped are so powerful — they help us know ourselves better. Through music. Reviewing our year in music seems to unlock a deeper truth from within us. It provides a moment to reflect back on key moments and our growth. There’s little functional utility in this; it’s a deeper utility, a boost of self-knowledge that improves our lives.
This realm is often mistaken today for Emotional Design, a concept pioneered by Don Norman. In his book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, he outlines the goal: to elicit a positive emotional response through products or offer “delight.” (For example, the colorful iMac caused sales of Macs to soar.) There are also a number of methods/frameworks to help identify product-related emotions. [1] [2] [3]
Emotional Design seems to lend itself well to peripheral product improvements (like cute animations, relatable copy, beautiful branding, and pleasurable transitions). I’m all for that; however, we have a different goal. We seek to identify — at its core — how a product can leave people stronger, happier, and more fulfilled.
For example:
We recently completed a project for a new credit card product. Through qualitative research, we learned that the target customer had really low financial trust in themselves. (Or in psychology terms, they had low ‘self-efficacy’.) Many of these people had accumulated thousands of dollars of credit card debt, and they saw credit cards as danger to their well-being. Instead of creating another credit card with features that incentivize spending, we realized that this customer’s well-being relied on having a credit card that would help them become stronger, more responsible spenders. The goal of this card was not to “delight” people; it was to help people live a better, more financially confident life. In fact, a delightful credit card may have inadvertently reinforced negative spending habits.
So I’ll ask again: is your product made out of wire or cloth?
We created a method to help people design well-being
Designing for well-being is like going for a scuba dive. We need to explore the deeper, murkier waters of human experience — which is far more complicated than simply snorkeling around the functional surface.
Our method helps design teams approach this systematically. And our framework helps teams unite around shared definitions and navigate the complexity of designing for well-being. Without an understanding of those factors and a shared language, we can’t analyze well-being. For example, you may use the word “control,” but your teammates may interpret it as self-confidence, understanding, or protection.
It’s worth noting that a number of frameworks seek to use well-being factors to influence product design; however, they don’t provide concrete tactics or inspiration to help innovators design for these abstract concepts. [4] [5] [6]
The Periodic Table of Human Elements®
This behavioral design framework is grounded in a wide survey of psychology literature, our own study involving 500 people, and our experience designing in many industries.
The Periodic Table consists of 20 human elements — building blocks of the deepest human needs and drivers of psychological well-being. With this framework as our guide, we can design products that support people at a deeper level.
However, it’s important to remember that well-being is a subjective experience and no single framework can fully capture its complexity. Nevertheless, we have combined extensive psychology research and practical design experience to create a tool that we hope will be helpful for designers.
These elements help us have a more precise conversation about people’s deeper needs.
For example:
Perhaps the vast majority of patients feel comfortable going to the doctor. However, what if your LGBTQ+ population leaves feeling misunderstood, embarrassed, and not supported? What are they experiencing? They probably don’t feel a fundamental respect (#7) or like there have enough of a shared system (#8) to feel comfortable.
There are four steps to the method
You can refer to our guide for more details and definitions for each human element.
Step 1: Explore the deeper story
Most product teams focus their efforts on researching surface-level behaviors and perfecting the surface-level experience. For instance, how can we decrease attrition in the onboarding process? While these questions are important, it’s easy to get trapped “snorkeling” at the functional surface. In fact, many product teams become feature factories that are consumed with delivering surface-level value instead of exploring something deeper.
However, designing well-being requires that we “scuba diving” into the underlying story. This research looks different than the typical user interview. There are many ways to access this deeper realm; we outline our tactic — called the Discension Technique — in our guide.
Step 2: Uncover the human elements
After exploring the deeper story, it’s time to uncover the deeper patterns. However, without the help of the Periodic Table of Human Elements, this subjective realm can be challenging to analyze.
In this step, we discuss the deeper patterns as a team. And we ultimately prioritize 2–4 human elements. These are the deeper factors that people need most in this product experience. By combining these factors, we create a wellbeing-centered product strategy.
Step 3: Pinpoint deeper needs
With the identified human elements, you now have the foundation of a wellbeing-centered product strategy. While the human elements provide a powerful grounding for each product in deeper psychological well-being, designing for them can feel overwhelming due to their broad nature.
Therefore, the next step is to pinpoint the deeper needs that deliver on each human element. In other words, what needs, if satisfied, will fulfill the human element and promote well-being.
Step 4: Design the 3-year product experience
The last step is to ideate for each deeper need and each human element to deliver well-being.
We bring together these solutions into a vivid illustration of the future product experience. This is used to clearly illustrate how well-being can be tangibly delivered and used to transform the product experience.
Many teams use a vision statement to socialize a product vision; we firmly believe that a sentence is not enough. People need to see the experience to understand it. That’s why we create a prototype of the future experience.
An example
This is a simple example to demonstrate how deeper needs can turn into a differentiating product experience.
Again, let’s imagine that we’re a financial services firm that targets customers with Fair Credit. (People with credit scores from 580 to 669.)
For these people, one of the human element they need most is control (element #1).
Money is inherently unpredictable. Expenses seem to pop up out of nowhere. And this is demoralizing. (E.g. the water heater breaks, gas prices skyrocket, or you unexpectedly owe taxes at the end of the year.) People feel like they have very little control over their finances. Kids have to go to camp. The holidays can’t be canceled. Many companies act like you have more control over this than you do. This is minimizing.
You Need a Budget Did (YNAB) has grown a loyal following of users. With YNAB, budgeting feels completely different Why? In my opinion, it is a traditional budgeting tool + control. Or according to one Reddit user, “Mint will tell you what you did, YNAB will help you plan.”
So how does YNAB do it?
YNAB has four financial rules to follow. And they’ve built a method around the product.
The first rule is to give every dollar a job. Instead of setting budget categories (like gas) and watching those fill up over the month, you assign your actual money to different “jobs” — almost like you’re spending the money in advance.
For instance, imagine you got paid $1000 today. YNAB has you assign that money to the specific expenses you will incur before you get paid again. (E.g. I need $35 for gas this week, so I move that money to fund that expense.)
This ‘assign feature’ (below) allows users to control real money and plan for individual purchases; not monitor broad categories.
YNAB doesn’t stop there. Rule 3 is to expect the unexpected.
‘Rigid budgets break. They break on paper, they break your heart, they break your budgeting willpower. When you overspend on groceries (note we said when…not if) — just move money from another category that’s less important. Our community calls this WAMing the money, which stands for Whack-a-Mole(ing).’
The typical budget product makes you feel like things have to go perfectly. But what happens when you exceed a category in Mint? You just…lose? YNAB eases this pressure and even gives you a term, “WAMing” to approach it differently.
These are just two features, but they illustrate how a deeper human element — like control — can be brought to life in a way that monumentally improves people’s lives.
At the end of the day, designing for well-being can feel elusive. It will never be perfectly easy; however, our goal is to provide the shared language, scientific grounding, and inspiration to help innovators design products that leave people stronger, happier, and more fulfilled.
Takeaways
- Is your product made of wire or cloth? 🤔
- Wire = products that reduce people to mere “users” and only meet their functional needs. 🏋️
- Cloth = products that consciously support people’s deeper needs and leave them stronger, happier, and more fulfilled. ☀️
- True competitive differentiation comes from the latter. However, this is more difficult. 😓
- That’s why we use the Periodic Table of Human Elements to operationalize this realm. It’s made up of 20 human elements, factors building blocks of well-being and our ability to live a good life. 🔬
- We follow 4 steps to uncover the human elements and design tangible features that deliver deeper value.💡
Hello!
I’m Alex Klein. I’ve been a product designer for 13 years. I founded Team Human, a Chicago-based innovation consultancy. We put well-being at the center of product design and develop products that leave people stronger, happier, and more fulfilled.
I’d love to connect! Say hey on Linkedin.
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References
[1] Khalid, H. M., & Helander, M. G. (2006). Customer Emotional Needs in Product Design. Concurrent Engineering, 14(3), 197–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/1063293X06068387
[2] Desmet, P. M. A., & Hekkert, P. (2007). Framework of product experience. International Journal of Design, 1(1), 57–66.
[3] Teresa Alaniz, Stefano Biazzo. (2019) Emotional design: the development of a process to envision emotion-centric new product ideas, Procedia Computer Science, 158, 474–484,
[4] Calvo, R., and Peters, D. (2014). Positive Computing: Technology for Wellbeing and Human Potential. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[5] Desmet, P. M. A., and Pohlmeyer, A. E. (2013). Positive design: An introduction to design for subjective well-being. Int. J. Design 7, 5–19.
[6] Peters D, Calvo RA and Ryan RM )2018) Designing for Motivation, Engagement and Wellbeing in Digital Experience. Front. Psychology. 9:797.
[7] Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
[8] Bollini AM, Walker EF, Hamann S, Kestler L. (2004) The influence of perceived control and locus of control on the cortisol and subjective responses to stress. Biol Psychol. 67(3):245–60. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2003.11.002.
[9] Tyler Nichola, Heffernan Roxanne, Fortune Clare-Ann. (2020). Reorienting Locus of Control in Individuals Who Have Offended Through Strengths-Based Interventions: Personal Agency and the Good Lives Model. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. Doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.553240
