Through the [emotion] looking glass

One day I’ll write a book about Alice…

Why? Because as an industry we’re far too rational, and far too reasonable in our methods and our thinking about experience. And this can blind us to the reality of people who don’t think like us.

Alice’s journey is a trippy tale that challenges and reframes rationality. In Wonderland things swap places, words become unstable, people and objects shrink and grow, mirrors abound. Through the looking glass normal rules are suspended, embedded assumptions challenged or subverted, and alternate realities glimpsed, albeit fleetingly.

Source: one of Tenniel's amazing images from the original books.

I think our inner worlds are a lot like this – feelings are rarely reasonable or rational. We’re just taught how to channel and conceal them. And then there are dreams, those manifestations of desire and delirium. Tapping into both, I’d argue, is a wellspring of both understanding and inspiration. A kaleidoscope of future experiences. 

Of course, this isn’t a new idea. As Mark Earls likes to remind us, we’re rationalising, not rational, apes. We know that, in our daily lives, we mainly act on instinct and impulse, not logic and reflection. We know that people don’t remember their lives accurately. We know we’re often poor predictors of our own behaviour.

What’s changed is that we now have the tools, techniques and data sources at our disposal to make better sense of this. I was pleased to be invited by Seth Grimes and Sandra Thompson to the CX Emotion conference earlier this month, to discuss exactly this – how CX can and should venture more through the [emotion] looking glass. You can check out the discussion on YouTube when you have more time.

Source: CX Emotion Conference 2020

Meanwhile I’d like to pick up and develop three provocations:

ONE

For customers, feelings are facts (so we need a richer emotional research palette)

TWO

For many businesses, these feelings are a blindspot (so we need to foster emotional intelligence to fully comprehend them)

THREE

For brands, building these feelings back into the experience creates value (so we need to design emotional signatures)

For me Alice is a powerful allegory for the diversity of the human experience. And a challenge to the way we think about doing research and design. If we want to understand customer motivation, map emotional experiences, re-imagine them, and help orient organisations around them, we need to marry intelligence about emotions with organisational emotional intelligence.

We need to be willing to spend time ‘through the looking glass’, to confront our own biases and come back again transformed. We need to be the connective tissue between what customers experience, feel, do and what happens on the other side of the mirror. Building the empathy and belief that puts the theory of CX into action through emotional design.

But how? Back to our 3 challenges. 

Step 1: develop a richer emotional research palette

There’s a lot of interesting work going on, using AI and other tools, to analyse and pinpoint emotional triggers. Much is word-based, but facial recognition and biometrics are also promising. This was showcased at CX Emotion and it’s worth keeping up with the latest from brands like Discover.AI, Sentient Machines, Morphii and others. But there are other tools too.

In our work we deploy what - inspired by Alice - I call “topsy-turvy methods”. These include having tantrums (encouraging extremes), meditation (or creative visualisation) where we ask people to dream, working with opposites (describe a world without wifi, or water, or technology…). And one that we never seem to tire of is Art from Within, a technique derived from Winnicott’s psychodoodles and French surrealism (brought to us by qualitative pioneers Roy Langmaid and Nicky Forsythe).

Art-based techiques are great for describing the ineffable, such as relationships with brands. For example, how UK citizens feel about dealing with the taxman: 

Or how US fans of challenger wine brand [yellow tail] feel about its role in their lives:

These approaches capture feelings, but rather than boiled down to a finite range of 6+ emotions, they are feelings wrapped in stories, creating a ‘thick’ and rich account of human emotion.

Step 2: foster organisational emotional intelligence

There’s still a debate about customer-centricity because fundamentally, we (managers, marketeers, designers) are often not like our customers. We don’t live their lives, we don’t get them. Deep down we make assumptions, that are based on our unconscious biases. There’s probably never been a better time to reflect on the invisible structures of bias, privilege, power, and this extends to experience too.

Even when we’re lucky enough to share qualities with our customers, businesses are programmed and structured against the grain: the skills we need to run them (e.g. data, engineering) aren’t always in tune with human needs and behaviours. Un-acknowledged, they can become blindspots.

So, how to build empathy? Well, data alone doesn’t make you feel anything. Data wrapped in a story gets you part way there. But humans mainly learn through experience. Because experiences create embodiment and memory.

When we were trying to bring to life the rider experience for Uber, we knew we needed something else (on top of the data, the maps, the evidence) to re-create the feelings of key moments in the journey: the instant you get in the car, that split-second first impression, the moment just before you get out, the parting words with the driver. All things that are hard to measure, hence can get overlooked.

So we developed a range of immersive games and activities, designed to make Uber colleagues FEEL something: a maze-drawing test, a “find the red popcorn in a giant box of popcorn” challenge. And our favourite, a game involving jelly beans, using a brand called Beanboozled (a bit like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour beans in the Harry Potter books).

Source: Beanboozled 5th edition ad

As you can see from the range, eating a Beanboozled bean is a risky undertaking. You might be lucky to get lime, peach or caramel. But the very same coloured beans might equally turn out to taste of lawn clippings, vomit or mouldy cheese. It’s amazing how quickly people stopped wanting to try another bean when they couldn’t be confident of the outcome. The roulette nature of experience. Captured in a moment. Which is exactly how it feels sometimes when you hop into an Uber.

Step 3: design emotional signatures

Often our main job is to change customers’ emotional reality, even (and especially) when we can’t change their physical reality. I often use the example of the bus stop “countdown” system that shows you how long till the next one is due. The system doesn’t make the buses come quicker, but they can make time go faster (since a watched pot never boils!).

These thoughtful features are often the difference between a frustrating and pleasurable customer experience. The best ones I think follow a virtuous loop of understanding and then internalising emotion in order to design it back into the experience, in the form of emotional signatures.

Spotify is a favourite case in point for me. I had the pleasure of working with them during their transition from tech-first to human-centric brand, identifying the human truth that music for most people is mood management, not foreground attention-consuming art. We realised this by mapping music moments (from taking a shower, to doing sport, to getting ready for a night out…) and it led to the development of mood search which is now more popular than genre. 

And now there’s Wrapped.

Source: Spotify Newsroom

What we love about Wrapped is how they’ve taken a functional, information-based, listing of content and literally wrapped it around a human ritual – the end of year ‘look back’ / forward. It works because Spotify are counting while you’re just getting on with life, but also because it’s nostalgic and celebratory. A bit like Christmas.

To summarise

Emotional intelligence is a cycle. We need to take feelings seriously. We need to capture and understand them. We need to build awareness of how and where they make a difference. Inside as well as outside. As a corrective to our rationally-driven assumptions. To make us more inclusive. And we need to act on them. To design feelings into experience. Intentionally, and with the brand in mind.

One day I’ll write a book about Alice…