yeah, the motivation is what Ted has also mentioned. in this norm, a sequence of functions $(f_k)_k$ converges to a function $f$ if and only if $f_k,f_k^{\prime},\dotsc,f_k^{(n)}$ all uniformly converge to $f,f^{\prime},\dotsc,f^{(n)}$ respectively. this means that this metric captures not only information about the function, but also its derivatives.
in particular, taking the $k$-th derivative yields a linear map $C^n\rightarrow C^{n-k}$ for $k=0,\dotsc,n$ and this maps are continuous with respect to these metrics. if you equipped all these spaces with the $C^0$-metric, the differentiation…