Designing Interactive Experiences Using Emotions
How do we understand user’s emotions more comprehensively & map them while conducting user research? A deep dive into designing experiences using emotions.
A while back I completed a course ‘Emotional design: Using emotions to move people’ by Stephan Mumaw. He gave some incredible teachings on this theme. So, I started a project to experiment with how to use emotions in the design process. I could not find much on using emotions to design an interactive experience, and hence I decided to write what I felt while working on the project. Would emotions add any value to the final product which is designed? Is it something that most designers already uncover in the design process but don't particularly know that they have researched and worked on it? How do we relate experience design to emotions? How do we understand user’s emotions?
This one’s going to be a long one. I am going to get into deep explanations at some points, while at some, I would be giving just an outline. So bear with me on this, grab a coffee, and let’s figure it all out!
The Connection: Design & Emotion
Let's begin by analyzing what do we, as designers really do? Simply put, we empathize with users to offer them a solution that solves their problems. So the primary purpose of a designer is to create an emotional connection with users and understand the emotion to insight-an-action! Which gives us a huge amount of power to put forward in our designs.
An interactive experience is gathered by five basic elements, as explained in UX Matters & Interaction Design Foundation:
- Words
- Visual Representations
- Physical Objects and Space
- Time
- Behaviour
Now, let's try to uncover what's happening while experiencing an interaction. If we look at the five elements we can easily derive:
Words communicate information in a verbal medium.
Visual representations also communicate information but via visual senses.
Physical objects and space are seen, touched, and felt: which is sensory information.
Time is a bit abstract, it’s the continuous sequence of events.
Behaviour is nothing but the human reaction of space, time, and experience.
If you look closely you will find ‘information’ being covered by Words, Visual representations, Physical objects and Space during an interactive experience. Now this ‘information’ that is being communicated between the user and the product is what is of most significant importance to us. Why? It is something that can be solved through design.
A designer when designing a product needs that information to be translated into something that makes the user feel the need to do an action. The best possible way for a human(the user)to understand this information is to empathize via emotion. Our brain is wired to receive signals and translates them into emotional value by recognizing objects and situations.
Discoveries
Let us look at what did Steven said in the course and then connect it with what I discovered while working on my project.
Emotions are very tough to be captured in a demographic. People living in the same demographic will have different emotions since everyone has different perspectives and experiences in life. The data which we uncover in the demographic research, even though covers some common things in that particular sample group, does not cover any individual aspect of these users.
All current processes like journey mapping are all based on the common grounds of multiple users, but not individual users. But since emotions felt by every user in the sample group are different, these maps somewhat defeat the purpose.
We can all see that individual user’s emotions cannot be mapped, it would only be in an ideal world. Steven puts forward a valid hypothesis saying: most personas are divided into age, occupation, or relationship. But even these all have different emotional triggers.
So the question is: What should be done to understand the emotions of multiple users in a much more comprehensive way without having to map individually? It can be done by 2 things:
- Immersion: To develop a process to understand human behavior by creating a behavioral map(covering space and time’s element of interactive experience as discussed above) & a quick map representing users' personality traits.
- A study of Cultural systems: Since cultural ideas and practices shape human emotions and other types of feelings.
Both of these should be studied upon by detaching yourself away from the user since any influence of the designer in the process stating what he/she feels defeats the purpose of the research.
If we put this together, emotions can more accurately be captured by understanding the sample group’s behavior, personality traits & cultural system and then crafting a persona based on it.
Emotion vs Rationalization
While researching, two factors come into the picture while users are ‘in a specific moment’: Emotions and Rationalization. Emotions are what users care about, how they feel in the moment. While rational is logical reasoning, the logic applied to everything humans think at the moment.
Both emotions and rationalization are conscious and non-conscious processes. Emotions are created when the brain uses our memories, thoughts, and beliefs to understand what is going on around us. This influences how we feel and act. This process has an impact on all of our decisions in some way.
While each of these variables should be considered when developing a daily experience, emotions often influence not just the nature of the decision, but also the speed with which users make it. Anger can result in impatience and rash decisions. If users are thrilled, they may make quick judgments without thinking about the consequences; if they are scared, their decisions may be clouded by ambiguity and caution, and they may take longer to make a decision.
Looking for an example? What did Star-lord do in Avengers: Endgame when everyone else was trying to get the Infinity Gauntlet off of Thanos’s hand? He made decisions emotionally & not rationally. This although, is a movie reference, but we all can understand how decisions like these are easily affected by emotions in our daily life.
So as designers, we are at an amazing standpoint or say a huge advantage, since we have the ability to design a product by not just understanding rational but also emotions.
Now that we know emotions lead to an experience, let's have a deeper look at emotions at a given moment.
The human brain is trained to filter out things that it looks at and helps focus on very specific things in that particular moment. Now let's look at what happens whenever you experience something:
- Physical experiential feeling that is triggered that consists of the past and the present. That consists of smell, sound, taste, visual feedback, and tactile feedback. This can also be called the input.
- Next what happens is the after-effect of that experience. This can also be called the output.
All of these happen in split seconds. The output of the experience depends if the user cares about the input or not. If the input is positive to her/him, they care about it. Now the output or the response to the experience can be of three types, they are:
- Visceral response: What am I going to do right now?
- Behavioral response: What should I do next?
- Reflective response: What will I do from this point forward? Which is more of a reflection or value change.
Now why do these 3 responses matter to us as designers? It's because each of these has emotional resonance attached to them.
Visceral response: This is something temporary for the user, like happiness, or anger.
Behavioral response: This is for the near future, something like contentment.
Reflective response: This is going to last for a course of time, hence it's going to be transformative, like optimism.
How do we know what users feel?
Users usually struggle to explain emotions since both emotion and words come out of the different parts of the brain. While conducting user research, we can note a person’s facial expressions & tone of speaking to understand the state of emotion he or she is feeling, this comes in handy in both observational as well as while conducting user interviews. These can be mapped with the help of behavioral, personality, cultural system & journey maps. These can then be used to formulate the whole ideation of the product or the experience around it!
To give a very basic idea, these emotions mapped can be used to design personas and be used in various other things like a physical product’s color, form factor, etc. For an interface design, we can have a layout, color, type, scale size, etc. For a physical interaction design, it opens up a pandora’s box!
Lastly, there are a few things that designers need to keep in mind. The mapping of emotions for a response to a product is one such aspect of understanding emotion, however, there are two other phases at play: the emotions felt before and while using the product. These are all equally important.
Summary
Emotions are a vital part of an experience. When relating to an experience of a product or service, emotions can be said to be divided into 3 stages: before, during, and after using the product or service. Every User Experience has 5 elements: Words, Visual Representations, Physical objects & Space, Time, and Behaviour. Emotional triggers for users are said to be affected via all of these combined.
People living in the same demography have different emotions because everyone has different perspectives and experiences in life, it can be concluded that usually, design processes do not uncover the individual aspect of understanding the user’s emotions. Journey mapping is one of the best and most efficient ways to map emotions, however, a much more extensive study can be done by: creating a behavioral map, creating personality traits maps for users, and then mapping a cultural system for the specific sample group.
While each of these variables should be considered when crafting an experience. We should also remember that emotions often influence the nature of the decision and the speed with which users make it. For example, users might make quick judgments without thinking about the consequences.
A user’s response to interaction is said to be of 3 types: Visceral, Behavioural, and Reflective response. With each of these responses, emotional resonance should be met when designing the experience for the users.
We should also consider the emotional triggers of an interactive experience & club them to find out the common patterns of users.
I hope this blog gives you a better idea of how to use emotions to design an interactive experience. This was my second post, and I hope you enjoyed reading this! If you wish to discuss something just drop a comment, I’m extra chatty on topics like these! :)
