Empathy through visualizations

Can JENGA help share what an UI makes you feel?

Does this sound familiar to you? You’re shopping online, everything is running smoothly, until you enter a step in the checkout process that results in a sudden drop in confidence and trust, and an increase of second-guessing.

I entered this state of mind just the other day when I bought tickets on a platform I hadn’t used before and felt overwhelmed by a “too wide for its own good” purchase funnel (you know, with all those bells and whistles of a countdown, upsell interstitials, and ad banners left, right, and center). While I cruised through the ticket selection without noticing any user interface issues, I now had to stop to figure out how to proceed. Like moving on shaky ground, this made me hesitant to go any further. I was wondering whether or not I could trust the platform itself.

In the end, I followed through and got my tickets without being scammed. I did everything right and learned that the platform is trustworthy and reliable. Still, the memory of this feeling remained and tainted my perception of this online platform to a point where I will look for an alternative the next time around.

Talk about feelings

I believe that in UX, trust must be established and reinforced at every single point of the user’s journey through the product or service you’re providing. I think it is one of the fundamental tasks of a user experience designer to ensure that the user of a product feels confident using it. Keeping in mind the emotional state a user is in, and the state you want them to be in at any moment should be a major influence in our design and decision-making process.

The problem is that if you work in the field of UX, chances are you know how hard it can be to employ the user’s emotional state as a valid argument, for example, during a sprint review with engineers and product managers. You have to find ways to get your point across in a collaborative setting with colleagues who don’t necessarily share your professional background, understanding of the world, and empathy levels.

Clearly communicating how a product can influence a user’s emotions and impact the user experience can be tricky, especially in an industry that is focused on business goals, feature sets, and obsolete measurements such as the number of clicks to evaluate and “critique” a product. Emotions are fuzzy, intangible, and complicated to describe in an objective manner, making them the weaker argument to bring to the table. And to be fair, defending your design choice with “it looks cool” or “users will love it” is highly subjective, not a convincing reason for anyone to buy-in.

It’s kind of silly: the understanding that people are influenced by their emotions is as old as politics and advertisement, and evoking a specific feeling plays a huge part in almost all industries, from car manufacturing to fast food. Yet in the field of User Experience Design, of Human Computer Interaction, we tend to put the emotional aspect on the back burner or delegate it to user research.

Show emotions

To provide a way for emotional states to become something tangible to design and measure against, I believe we need to establish the following:

1. a set of emotions relevant to interacting with a product, not too broad, not too specific;

2. a scale of severity for each, to rank, compare and measure; and

3. a solution to communicate them in a way that resonates with most, if not all.

While producing a comprehensive list of UX relevant emotions is beyond the scope of this post, I think using an empathic, metaphoric, and visual approach can be a good way to tackle the other two needs.

Essentially, we would want to evoke the desired emotion in someone through highly relatable imagery as a storytelling device.

To make this work, the metaphor must be highly relatable; the more inspiration you can draw from everyday life, basic human interactions, or sensory experiences, the better. People tend to share the same anatomic building blocks after all (statistics telling me the average human being has less than two hands be damned), so make use of this to find that common ground.

Let me give you an example of such a metaphor inspired by the issues I faced buying those tickets and how lost I felt going through the buyer’s journey.

The JENGA scale of confidence

The JENGA scale of confidence is a way to place the confidence level of a user in one of 4 states, from highly confident to completely uncertain.

JENGA is a game where you have a tower of tightly stacked wooden blocks for those who don’t know. Players take turns removing one block out of the tower and placing it back on top, making the structure taller and less stable with every passing turn. At first it’s relatively easy to remove a block without risking the tower’s integrity, but towards the end the operation is more delicate and risky. The goal is simple: don’t let the tower tumble. It’s pretty self-explanatory, and the level of complexity and risk can easily be judged just by looking at the tower in its various states, even without having ever played the game.

This, in my opinion, makes JENGA a great candidate for a metaphor of confidence in a user interface. Once transcribed to a scale of 1 to 4, each for a different level of confidence (or lack thereof), it could look like this:

State 1: Start of the game; relaxed, high confidence
State 2: Mid game; focused, but confident
State 3: End game; nervous, losing confidence
State 4: Hail Mary; lost, no confidence to proceed

Using this visual aid in usability tests could make it easier to get comparable data without losing the genuine emotional response you’re looking for. Using it in design reviews might provide everyone in the room with the same vocabulary to voice their state of mind without being perceived as biased. It might also prove a useful tool for people who have a harder time expressing themselves, be it through cultural, language, or other barriers.

Ideally, it can create a shared emotional understanding and relation to what someone else is feeling — in other words empathy.

Continue to reflect

So where to go from here? More research is needed to test this hypothesis and approach for starters, and see how empathy is being explained today in design teams and in fields outside of UX.

For now, here’s to raising awareness about using empathy as a design tool, and to building products with a shared understanding of the users emotional state in mind.