What is effective emotional design?

Emotional design is the art of creating experiences that engage your users. To do this, you need to understand how your users think, what they want, and how they will use your product.

The look, the feel, the tone, everything has to work together to create a cohesive product, taking into account the emotional response that people have towards it.

Here we talk about designing for experiences that build an emotional connection with users or make them feel special by bringing delight.

Build an emotional connection by factoring in the ‘wow-experience’

The ‘wow-experience’ exists in every domain of products in our daily lives that evokes an emotional response in us (even when we don’t realise it). For instance, we find ourselves saying, “Wow! This chair is really comfortable”, “Wow! This car is the coolest with all its features”, or “Wow! Look at this unique design of the bookshelf”.

This exploration of examples shows us that designing for eliciting the wow-experience can be essential in creating an effective emotional design.

Here’s a research paper titled “Emotional Design: Application of a Research-Based Design Approach” by P. M. A. Desmet & R. Porcelijn & M. B. van Dijk. It discusses an approach to ‘design for wow’ that focuses on the emotions that constitute a ‘wow-experience’.

Some digital products we use (and prefer) are more delightful and engaging than others. Consumer researchers have claimed that those products that provide a more meaningful and pleasant user experience will be more successful than those that do not.

This experience of excitement plays a factor in motivating users to prefer one product over another.

The three pillars (features) to emotional design: basic, performance, and excitement.

Basic features:

Basic features are the foundation of the product and lay the groundwork; without them, the product can be rendered ineffective. Users expect these features to be delivered (such as a car’s turn signal). This means they must be included. And, if they don’t deliver to the user’s expectations, then they may lead to dissatisfaction. For instance, for a mobile phone, the primary facility would be a database to store phone numbers and be able to call.

Performance features:

Performance features are those that help differentiate between competing products. For example, mobile phones’ performance features would include weight, screen size, stand-by time, processing speed and more.

This type of feature is “one-dimensional” because of the direct, linear correlation between how much you invest in it and the amount of customer satisfaction it delivers. This model was proposed by Terninko in “Step by step QFD: Customer-driven product design”

Excitement features:

Excitement features are those the user did not expect to see in the product and is excited to experience. These are additional features to the basic ones. Continuing on the mobile phone example, GPS systems or high-resolution video cameras can be exciting features of mobile phones.

These features are not crucial to the product’s functioning but add to its overall aesthetic and appealing value. If these features are not incorporated into the design, users might not even notice its absence. However, if you include them and continue to invest in them, you will create dramatic customer delight.

In short, all the three levels mentioned above are crucial in making the product engaging and make it distinguishable from its counterparts to the users.

These three levels examine products in different areas including aesthetics, function, and the impact of the product on the user’s life.

Let’s check out some examples of these three feature sets in real life.

1. Spotify:

• Basic features: Listening to music and podcasts of choice.
• Performance features: Spotify has better audio quality, better music selections, better UI and UX.
• Exciting Features: Spotify tailors “Daily Mix” albums every day for the users based on their music taste. It also makes “Spotify Wrapped” for each user at the end of every user, where Spotify analyses their top songs, top genre, total minutes listened, and favourite artists. Spotify Wrapped always interests the users and is a huge hit on social media.

2. Instagram:

• Basic features: Sharing photos with friends and family.
• Performance features: Instagram offers a high-resolution photo upload quality, variety of media upload options, faster performance, etc.
• Excitement features: Introduction of posting reels. Reels has taken the social media world by storm.

3. Snapchat:

• Basic features: Communicating with friends through images (snaps).
• Performance features: Snapchat offers more privacy than other products since the picture disappears after viewing it once. The temporary chat feature also adds to the better privacy aspect.
• Exciting features: Snapchat has a variety of filters to attract more people, lets users draw and add text to their images, and save pictures for memories. One can also create their bitmoji, which resembles their face or be creative with it. Basically, users can customise their content however they please.

“Everything has a personality: everything sends an emotional signal. Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions.” — Don Norman, Grand Old Man of User Experience