Designing the emotional user experience
I was reading a blog post recently by a member of our Riff Raff web design team, Richard Powell posing the question of whether user experience design is an emotional or logical discipline.
I thought I’d share a story that I felt was quite appropriate, and that will hopefully add some subtle shading to a fascinating topic. It’s a story that helps us to understand how human beings make decisions, and how important it is to cater for both the emotional and logical side of any customer experience — either online or off. Apologies if you’ve heard it before.
The story is about a perfectly ordinary young accountant from the USA, who in 1982 was diagnosed with cancer, having developed a tumour in the front side of his brain. Shortly thereafter, he underwent major surgery to have the tumour removed.
At first, it appeared that the operation had been a big success, and that the tumour had been removed without leaving any permanent brain damage. Early signs were extremely positive and he continued to score within the 97th percentile in intelligence tests.
And then things started to go wrong.
He began to experience difficulty making the simplest decisions. Even trivial choices — such as whether to sign a form in black ink or blue — proved to be impossible to make. He struggled to overcome endless logical arguments that led him round and round in circles — the form was printed in black, so blue ink would stand out more, but black would be picked up better in photocopies… Over and over he would analyse even the most elementary questions, winding up in a paralysing feedback loop that made it impossible for him to make a decision.
Further tests revealed that the tumour had indeed caused irreparable brain damage — specifically to his limbic system — the part of the human brain responsible for emotions. It had effectively rendered him emotionless — like a real-life Mr. Spock.
You’d think that having no emotions would have made him completely rational, and that if anything, decision-making should have become easier, free from the burden of feeling. In actual fact, the opposite was true, and his loss of emotion had left him pathologically indecisive.
The reality is that we make decisions every day using a combination of logic and emotion, and if either one is missing, the other is incapable of leading us to a satisfactory conclusion. Whilst our rational brain weighs up both sides of an argument carefully, it is our emotional brain that overrides that psychological decision-making process, swinging us one way or the other.
In order to commit to a decision, our emotional brain must feel strongly enough to overlook certain logical arguments, and sway our judgement towards the most attractive path. This is a fundamental part of our decision-making process and the reason why great design and messaging will never be replaced by pure data. I highly recommend that you listen to the full story at Radio Lab. It’s a fascinating tale and one that helps us to understand the decision-making process as intrinsically emotional and logical.
As user experience designers, we can apply this to our everyday work as we create solutions that not only allow visitors to find the information they’re looking for, but to engage them both rationally and emotionally, helping them to make positive decisions.
It’s important to remember this as the creative industry faces something of a crisis with the systematic commoditisation of creativity, in light of newer data-driven user experiences. We must remember that, in digital marketing at least, it is as important to inspire as it is to inform, and that great design is fundamental to this sensuous process.
This is a key driver in the runaway success of devices like the iPod. Despite the fact that they’re over-priced and woefully under-specced compared with the competition — both very logical flaws — they appeal to an emotional sensibility that most of us find impossible to ignore. They look and feel beautiful, and the artificial sense of status that we derive from owning them makes them an extremely compelling proposition.
Hopefully this will have added something to the debate about user experience design, and whether it’s a scientific or creative discipline. I strongly believe that any customer experience, whether designed to persuade or empower, needs to be both rationally and emotionally engaging in order to work effectively.
