Emotion in Design
Creating Products That Customers Will Love
Our goal as Enterprise UX designers is to create simple, intuitive, and delightful experiences that attract customers to our company’s products and have a positive impact on the company brand. In this article, I want to share three principles for how good design can use emotion to create products that people will feel for, care for, and own for a lifetime.
Let’s get started with a thought experiment.
Take a look at the two tea cups below:
Compare the two cups. Both are used to hold and drink tea, but which one do you think is more expensive? Which one would you showcase to your friends during a dinner party? Which one feels warm? Which one feels cold?
The cup pictured on the right is from a traditional Japanese tea set. These tea sets are highly valued and passed from family generation to generation because of the respect and love of their craftsmanship.
“Aichaku is the Japanese term for the sense of attachment one can feel for an artifact. It’s written using two kanji characters, which mean “love” and “fit.” “Love-fit” describes a deeper kind of emotional attachment that a person can feel for an object. It’s a belief that this object deserves affection not just for what it does, but for what it is.”
— John Maeda, “The Laws of Simplicity”
Acknowledging this concept of ‘Aichaku’ and incorporating it into our design process is a powerful way to create products that our customers will love and recommend to others.
The 3 key principles to develop this relationship are Relate, Trust, and Surprise. Let’s discuss each one starting with Relate.
1. Relate
The first principle is to leverage the human instinct to relate — to be comfortable by recognizing patterns and connections. The most effective way to do this is to leverage the user’s existing skills. These can be domain-specific skills: for example, using terminology and iconography that are standard in the industry. These can also be every-day human skills — create metaphors with patterns in our daily lives. The most famous one is the computer desktop metaphor: our digital folders, files, and digital trashcan imitate the organization of the real-life office desk. We can also make use of biomimicry: patterns from nature that humans have evolved to recognize subconsciously.
Example 1: Network Data Visualization
The graph below shows connections and flow of data packets inside a data center and device fabrics using a visual metaphor to the flow of water between streams and rivers:
Example 2: Grouped Data Column Styling
Grouped column styling in data tables uses natural visual cues of line and shadow similar to groups of feathers in folded wings:
2. Trust
The second principle is Trust — establishing user confidence in design for reliable actions and services. This can be established through positive perception of quality: good materials and craftsmanship. Material and craft quality is built through care for details that combined together impact the total impression. Trust in design also depends on speed and time: how a product automates and removes constraints to increase efficiency. It is most important to meet user expectations. Users trust the process that matches the speed and time they expect — not too fast, not too slow, just right. Product aesthetics also affect user trust by how appropriate the design is to the audience. Aesthetics is the philosophy around beauty and how different audiences perceive it. We should think about the type of beauty our users appreciate and apply it to our materials, technology, and design process.
Example 3: Firewall Policy Rules Grid
Based on feedback from users, we had to develop a balance between displaying important technical details and a clean way to see the full picture of the firewall status — a balance that our users trust and consider beautiful:
Example 4: Product Dashboard
Product dashboards have to maintain a balance of technical insight and a clean visualization of the overall system status:
3. Surprise
The third principle, Surprise, is a way to create experiences that are deeply engaging along some unexpected, positive dimension. To surprise is to go beyond and drive innovation. We should consider the current trends in the industry — 5G, virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence — and how to incorporate them in our products. Another way to positive surprise is to create memorable experiences that are delightfully intuitive — something customers remember and understand immediately.
Example 5: Surprise with Animation
We can highlight relevant information and we can animate how we show, hide, and filter visualizations to make them come alive:
In closing, emotion in design is created by making the user Relate, Trust, and experience positive Surprise. We can use these principles and ‘Aichaku’ (the object love-fit) philosophy as we architect user experiences across all types of enterprise products. By establishing emotional connections, we can create products that customers will love and own for a lifetime.
This article was inspired by John Maeda’s principles in the “The Laws of Simplicity”. It’s a quick and interesting read about how we can find simplicity in design, work, and personal life.
