On Design — Emotion in Digital Design Explained for Non-Designers
For a digital product to fully reach its potential, there is something more needed than pop-ups, call-to-actions all over the place, and features no one asked for. A positive change, for one.
When was the last time you read an article somewhere uninterrupted by a pop-up begging you to leave some personal information to get more of those awesome interruptions? How about those washing machine or new smart speaker ads following you everywhere you go? How often were you persuade to buy a product or a service and ended up not that impressed or happy with it?
Last year, close to $400 billion was spent on online advertisement. In one year. A very strange year even. And still, the digital ads business is growing by the second. Imagine how much good that money can do for this planet and for the people. Imagine one of the giant companies that are so used to spending millions on ads, all of the sudden starts building more valuable products that can change people’s lives for the better? Sounds very sci-fi, I know, but is it that impossible? What’s holding us back?
Persuasive psychology for one. We’re all falling victims to it. All of us, with no exceptions. It just works too well. Not even Robert Cialdini can escape it. Social media is addictive, we all know that. It’s what it is meant to be in the first place. And the ‘next big thing’ will probably be addictive as well. And the thing after that. Addiction sells like nothing else. And no-one seems to mind. We just collectively tell ourselves that we use the Internet to connect with others, meanwhile scrolling through the infinite scroll on Insta while having dinner with friends. It’s connecting us to ads, that’s for sure, but to people, not so much. Not as much as the real world can. But apparently, we love buying stuff. Clothes, tech, bad ideas and ways of thinking, we buy it all. And then blame unhappiness on ourselves and buy more to be happy and content. Time to change this broken narrative for the better.
Where I’m getting with this is — if only companies spend as much money and time on improving their product or improving the world, as they spend on ads, maybe it would have been a better and happier world for us to live in. Luckily, people’s consciousness is shifting. We see the damage to the planet, we see the damage to ourselves, we see the damage to others around us. Soon enough that consciousness will grow into a new generation of Internet users that are not so easy to deceive. Soon we’re going to value brands that have a clear mission that we can align with. Brands that truly understand us. There is more and more talk about the end of globalisation as we know it. Soon countries will unite over values and missions, not over geographical location or ideological or religious views.
And when the consciousness of countries and people shifts, companies need to either follow or lead. But change is inevitable. So how do you shift the focus from functional consumerism to emotional impact? There is an easier-than-you-think approach to this.
Functional vs Emotional
Here is a famous visualisation from the book Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter. He compares Maslow’s pyramid of human needs to the pyramid of user needs.
Sounds pretty straightforward when you see it like this, but in practice, that top layer is almost never met. Not a lot of people enter the self-actualisation part of the pyramid, and not a lot of digital products enter that top-level as well. Shame really.
Thing is — Aarron Walter did an amazing job putting the concept of ‘Pleasure’ in the books but also in real practice, so I’m in no way discrediting his work. But without his 20 years-of-experience presence, it’s difficult to steer a whole team to the top of this pyramid. Somewhere between Reliable and Usable lays great comfort. A lot of digital products hang out there. I mean:
-“Is it functional enough, we might need a bunch of new features to make it more functional”;
-“Ooh and now we have 3 new features followed by 20+ bugs, damned it, how did no-one see that one coming?”
With bugs and errors, Reliability suffers. Too many errors and people are gone forever. Usable refers to how user-friendly a product is. The problem is that we call the people whose lives we try to better “users”, which somehow does not have a positive ring to it, so we distance ourselves from them. We often talk about ‘users’ and how their only aspiration in life is to use what we have to offer. We assume that they know as much as us about our products, history, goals, and missions, the Monday discussions with the salespeople, and how these newly added 7 features are exactly what you, dear user, asked for.
Been there, thought that, got a headache. Anyway, and then there is pleasurable. Pleasurable is that final layer of emotion to be added, but as indicated by Aarron in his book, is often missing in most products. So I get his idea to create this visualisation of a pyramid. I also get that everything needs to be functional first before it can deliver any pleasure or fun. Broken things suck. But… it’s either an outdated way of looking at things or a way that never really makes it in companies processes. Here’s why:
Companies will spend gigantic amounts of money to make something functional and quasi usable, and then gigantic amounts to advertise it, and then the money is either gone or recycled back to the ads people.
But consumers change. Functional, reliable, and usable do no longer impress us since EVERYTHING online has those three characteristics. You can’t even publish an app to the play or app store if it does not meet those three criteria. So what often happens in the world of design is that le MVP gets released and it does not get people very excited, it solves zero problems and it’s not as successful as we prayed. Solution? Add more functionality to it and ship it to the marketing team for the second round of sales. So it’s not even a pyramid in our head, it’s a closed-loop between functionality and PMF, CRO, SEO, and other non-human 3 lettered abbreviations. Welcome to the 21st CTR. Eeeh.. century. Anyway, the process is kinda broken, here is an easy fix to it.
Future-proofing your product
So how do we get ourselves out of the loop? Let’s rethink digital for a moment. Accessibility and inclusive design are gaining more and more popularity for all the good reasons. Value-adding products are winning over FOMO, ethical design is starting to battle the privacy issues with those data-driven approaches that brought chaos to daily life and politics. So there are so many other criteria that a digital product nowadays has to fulfill to win people’s hearts. If I was to visualise the perfect formula of what a future digital product should focus on, it would look like this:
A honeycomb. Isn’t that a wonderful metaphor? We are the bees, the comb is the process and honey is the end product. A sweet, healthy experience that is sticky with emotion.
Adding value to a person’s life should be at the center of all digital products. At least the one that wants to succeed and win people’s hearts. Surrounded by ethical design and accessibility to not exclude groups of people from being able to use it, and to make sure that people’s privacy is respected. Functional, reliable, and usable are of course there as well, the product should work responsively and consistently and it should also be easy to understand. And then there is no ‘pleasurable’ but delightful. Pleasurable hints that every product should spin around pleasure and fun. Not everything can be fun and confetti, but everything can be delightful.
Delight = relief + surprise
Delight is something that is felt when there is anxiety, fear, stress, etc. followed by relief. It’s the literal embodiment of feeling lighter than a second before. When there is no negative emotion in the first place, delight can be used as a surprise instead of relief. So with delight one can turn negativity into a neutral or positive state and a neutral or positive state into a higher level. A hug when you feel down, or a balloon that makes you feel extra special.
Delight triggers the creation of dopamine in our brains. And dopamine is our brain’s very own drug. We love it. It makes us happy and warm and it improves our memory and learning abilities. It’s the chemical of desire and motivation. Everything that can trigger dopamine will make people desire it more and be more motivated to obtain it. Like social media or drugs. But also positive things can trigger dopamine reactions. Gamification elements for one. Showing people the progress that was made by them doing something.
But how do you create delight? It’s not an easy job, but definitely not impossible. Before I tell you the little secret of emotion in design, let’s see some great examples of places where it is implemented properly.
Surprise, surprise — It’s Mailchimp
Mailchimp is famous for its clever UX copy, micro-interactions, and not corporate at all B2B branding. Here are some very famous examples of how they created either relief or surprise for their customers.
Mailchimp is growing and they rebranded recently, I don’t know how much of Freddie Von Chimpenheimer IV (the famous Chimpanzee mascot) is still alive, but I do know that without him, they wouldn’t have been where they are now. How many other email marketing tools have won so many hearts throughout the years?
User’s nightmare — the login screen
Login screens are where all love exits the house. I dare to argue that this place sees more errors & bugs than a whole-new-round-number of any OS update. Technical issues, so many login options with different logos followed, passwords forgot. “Was it the easy one or the one with the number, special characters, old Egyptian hieroglyph, and the blood of a virgin?” we ask ourselves. Places of frustrations really.
But some designers figured differently, with the power of motion, which of course is a big emotion carrier, I mean, what even is emotion without motion…. e? Those designers (and companies) added delight by combining both relief and surprise. Here is how:
Headspace — the embodiment of emotion in design
Everything about Headspace centers around positive emotion and delight. From their awesome app with well-made, portrait first videos, daily Wake Ups with sometimes Kevin Hart, to their Netflix’s show and youtube channel content.
The video above is according to Icy Bear an ad as well, and more than 200 people don’t even mind nor skip it.
And there are a few more good examples. Both not enough. There are way more of the below-average ones. So how to solve it?
Big reveal time
Take a good look at everything shown above. There is a clear pattern in there. Yes, it’s all illustration and words but no humans. And yet… yet… everything is very human. Voila! The secret to fun artificial things — human-ism. Is that even a thing yet? It might be soon. Algorithism vs. humanism. What a sad battle between our I-was-a-bonobo-a-bunch-of-millions-years-ago brain that hasn’t change that much and an AI with unlimited access to everything, ever. I wonder who will win if we keep the course in the same direction we have been sailing till now. We occasionally surfed the net in the 00s, now we’re sailing in dark new waters. Long live self-made idioms.
Anyway, dopamine gets through our body when we hug living things, and not tables or solar panels. Those User Interfaces of ours just need to feel a bit more human and understanding, to just remind people that what they see is made by other people. By us. And we get them. We struggle the same struggles and we all on a path to better selves. Right? So why do we hide our collective personality as a brand behind the usual stuff we have seen everywhere? Things like “Wrong password!!” or.. almost everything online really. If we consider the honeycomb of the 7 criteria illustrated above, then a piece of all the 7 combs will be always present in what we develop and those honeycombs can only grow in the future. But if we focus on one of those, functionality for instance, and ship it to the people under the excuse of the MVP, it will die before it can feel alive. That’s a sad creation and a waste of resources. Don’t you think?
So if you made it thus far, congratulations on the iron will and focus, hardly seen nowadays. If you’re hungry for more, here’s a takeaway. Make human stuff for humans. Everything can be either not-human, as seen everywhere, or uniquely human with the potential to put a smile on someone’s face.
Let’s make this a discussion, what are your thoughts on how design processes currently work? I’m very curious. Thanks for checking this article out, see you soon.
