Emotions are complex and complicated yet they play a crucial role in human behavior. Detecting, understanding, and responding to emotions is something innate in humans.
There are three ways someone can respond to something that we create visceral, behavioural, or reflective.
Visceral is the immediate response to what they see or they experience. Behavioural is what they do after they see it. It’s more of a reaction to it. And reflective is what changes within them after they experience something that we’ve created. How they respond defines the design’s success, but why they respond defines a designer’s success. What causes each type of response? It’s important for a designer to know because it leads straight to the goal of the project. Art drives a visceral response. What we experience and the emotions we feel the moment we see or experience something.
Ideas drive behavioural response. It’s the concepts behind the work that we do. It’s the messages we’re communicating and the emotions that we’re conveying. Those are the things that drive action. But ideals drive reflective response. And it’s not usually something that design can do alone.
The reflective response is a change in perspective. That’s not usually something that design can provide. It’s usually much more foundational within a brand. It’s usually understanding what they believe, what they stand for, and then what they do to support that, what actions they take. That might change the way that we see that brand. It might allow us to support them in a way that’s beyond commerce, to advocate for them. Now we’re changing our perspective on the way that that brand or the way that we viewed that brand in the past.
Connecting emotions to User Experience
- What do we do when a page takes more than 10sec to load? — Annoyed 😒
- If You are filling a form which has more then 10 Questions with a long scroll. — Boredom will hit you and you might just leave. 😐
- Doing a transaction — alert 😳
- When Alexa or Siri responds to us — Happy 😁
Behavioural Emotional Design
A behavioural reaction is how we feel as we are immersed in the product experience. It is how we react to our product interactions and derive value from the products we use, also more commonly known as usability.
From an emotional perspective, when our interaction behaviours are fluid, expected, and familiar, then we derive joy and satisfaction from the product’s usability.
The Product we remember
Why Should you think about Emotional Design?
Great design can evoke positive emotions. These could be curiosity, gratitude, surprise, originality, Happiness, success, satisfaction.
Think about Using Instagram or Facebook or the apps that you use on a daily basis. Which emotions do you have when using it? Surprise can be one of these emotions.
The feeling of having achieved something
This doesn’t necessarily need to come from a completed project.
I use Trello every day, and it helps me(the user) to do what I want to do.
This evokes positive feelings.
For example: laying out my tasks and deadlines in Trello, Moving tasks from “Doing” to “Done” can also have a positive effect on motivation
It is critical that designers understand how emotional design envelops the entire experience, from first discovering the product, to using it, and finally to thinking about the product after it has been used.
It is not enough to cultivate an experience with just ‘love at first sight’. That love must be perpetual, enduring, and shareable.
Emotions and User Experience was originally published in Designerrs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.