Aarron Walter, MailChimp’s user experience design lead, has developed an insightful model for what goes in to creating great software. Clearly a reskinning of the famed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Walter’s pyramid (as seen below) is a representation of the four basic user needs that must be considered when building software.

During my architectural studies at Texas A&M, we didn’t spend much time discussing pyramid construction, but I’m fairly sure that if the lower tiers are weak, the top tiers will crumble. That said, here is a quick breakdown of Walter’s model:

1. Functional – Above all, software has to actually function. A button titled “Outbound Activity” must actually load a report that displays outbound calling data.
2. Reliable – A user needs to know that the outbound calling data they are viewing is accurate and secure data.
3. Usable – This data must be organized to be quickly accessible and easy to understand.
4. Delightful – This is the key piece that Walter focuses on, and the piece that sets MailChimp apart from its competitors. Delightful software must appeal to the user on an emotional level, and produce an insightful and memorable experience.

Different members of Century Interactive’s dev team focus on different tiers of this pyramid within our products, and so I am going to kick of a short mini-series written by our different team members, focusing on how we strive to improve our functionality, reliability, usability, and delightfulness.

Here are the links to the posts for each topic:

• Functionality – coming soon
• Reliability- coming soon
• Usability: Designing with Data
• Delightfulness – coming soon