The Best Solution to Increase User Engagement
Why Emotion Is Essential
The competition out there is fierce. Without making a lasting impression your users will remember, you will lose out on major opportunities for growth.
Emotional design is the idea that you can evoke strong emotions with design to drive conversion rates and establish customer loyalty. In fact, neuroscience data correlates emotion to the primary result of purchasing decisions from customers.
When a viewer connects with your design on an emotional level, they will remember it!
Emotion is no longer just a byproduct of design. Emotions affect us on the cognitive level, it is what drives the user experience and is an essential component of your UI. Early adopters of this idea, like Steve Jobs, realized that design is not only about aesthetic appeal, but how it works.
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What Makes an Emotional Impact
We need to think through three different design concepts: visceral design, behavioral design, and reflective design.
Visceral Design is all about first impressions. Positive emotions must immediately be provoked to encourage action so users don’t leave without engaging with your content.
Credibility, trustworthiness, and ease of use are all contributing factors to promote a visceral design.
Behavioral Design prioritizes effectiveness and ease of use. I’ve seen it stated that behavioral design “is like a lock and key”. The lock represents the customer behavior, while the product represents the key.
The goal is to meet user needs subconsciously, leaving users to feel satisfied and in control.
In order to effectively achieve behavioral design, you must know your users as you explore ways to connect with them emotionally.
Complete user interviews and surveys to gather data to inform future personas. This can then lead to creating persuasive user journeys, resulting in engagement and brand loyalty.
Not sure how to produce effective personas?
Check out my template for creating personas here: https://letstalkuxwebsite.wordpress.com/2021/03/05/persona-template/
and blog post here:
Reflective Design is about developing an experience that users connect with on an emotional level and results in personal satisfaction.
Questions like, “Does it make their life easier?”, and “Was it a pleasurable interaction?” will all contribute to an emotional bond to establish customer loyalty and social proof.
Apply reflective design with the following techniques:
- Personal helper for tasks
- Incorporate personality with animated micro-interactions and screen transformations
- Typography
- Personalize the content for each user
- Light-hearted error messaging
- Pleasant customer testimonials
- Pictures of your office
Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion
Humans’ have three main emotions: sad, neutral, and happy, however, we all know humans are more complex than that. This is where Plutchik's Wheel of Emotion comes to help.
What is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion?
Plutchik concluded that there are eight basic emotions:
- Anger
- Disgust
- Fear
- Sadness
- Anticipation
- Joy
- Surprise
- Trust
With his theory, Plutchik established the wheel of emotion to help us understand the nuances of human emotion and how they contrast with each other.
This can be useful to designers when understanding the complexities of human emotion. You can design for various emotions and emotional intensities strategized for the desired outcome.
It is important to understand how to properly infuse the different emotions. Once you discover the primary emotion, the wheel assists in analyzing which emotions combine to result in a secondary (more intensified) emotion, etc.
Getting started with Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion
This technique should start in the journey mapping stage. A journey map provides visibility into what a user does, how they feel when they do it, interactions with your system, pain points, and potential opportunities at each stage of the journey. This makes it easier for us to visualize how users are feeling and what actions are a result of that feeling.
After identifying what users are feeling, we can decide where to improve the journey by identifying desired emotions to help determine the ‘ideal’ state.
Note: It will be useful to list the objective of the ideal state under the emotion for future reference.
The importance of tone in branding is a story for another day… but do know it is important in establishing recognition and trust with your users.
To maintain a consistent experience, it will be useful to consider the tone of voice throughout each journey stage. It will play a major role in creating the desired emotion in accordance with the objective.
Be Like Facebook and Google
Many successful tech companies work to create an immersive experience with their product. This involves a user going through a series of emotions such as joy, surprise, delight, etc while avoiding negative emotions, frustration, boredom, and sadness.
Let's take Facebook as an example. Do you ever find yourself mindlessly scrolling through Facebook? Can you identify the emotions that kept you engaged on the platform?
Facebook strategically designs for an experience to prevent boredom. Every time you refresh the page, Facebook updates your feed with something you haven’t seen before, creating anticipation for users and a feeling that they can’t get enough.
And Google! Have you ever noticed the tactics they include in their error messaging such as humor and gamification?
Their strategy is to counter negative emotions.
When Facebook recognized potential feelings of boredom, and Google recognized potential feelings of frustration, they were able to take action to shift those negative emotions into something positive.
It’s a good idea to start with your journey map to highlight pain points and emotions associated with those pain points.
Throughout each iteration, you can try new approaches to overturn negative emotions and then measure your progress.
Reference my PDF at
to assist in your brainstorming session to shift user emotions.
You won’t regret taking the time to understand the journey, the user, and their emotions.
Have you ever designed for emotion?
Have you ever incorporated emotion into your journey maps?
Resources:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/emotional-design
https://medium.com/google-design/design-for-emotion-7ba0cf40e05b
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/emotional-design
https://uxmentor.me/driving-more-valuable-customer-journeys-with-emotion-mapping-part-1/
https://uxmentor.me/driving-more-valuable-customer-journeys-with-emotion-mapping-part-2/
https://uxdesign.cc/emotive-ui-10cb9811c35e
https://medium.com/@phui168/product-design-start-with-the-emotions-8f4b3d3a5b07
https://elearningindustry.com/5-elearning-tips-use-plutchiks-wheel-of-emotions
https://positivepsychology.com/emotion-wheel/
https://medium.com/blibli-product-group/using-emotion-map-in-ux-writing-461d09db8d
Photo by Ed Pylypenko on Unsplash