The Return to Human: Unlocking the Importance of Understanding Emotion in Service Design (a compendium of arguments)
Our most defining moments and memories are always associated with an emotional state. Our survival depends on it. Events and interactions in the real and digital world are constantly calling on and competing for the attention of our senses, and one way our bodies and minds alert us to important events is by triggering an emotional experience.
The way we consume content and engage with services is also rapidly changing. People’s threshold for patience and concentration is decreasing as our attention competes between being on social media on our smartphones and other traditional media channels. And while we expect engagement with necessary public services to remain higher since they lead to benefits people rely on, interacting with government services is often far from the simple experience we usually seek out.
However, there is great risk in over-inflating the success of public services and downplaying the adverse emotional influences they may have on us by virtue of their perceived value. Heckell’s law, coined by Nigell Derrett, asserts that the more we determine a service (or anything for that matter) as being necessary in our lives, the more likely we are to put up with its shortcomings. For example, people put hundreds of hours in to learn the Bassoon (and other musical instruments) despite how difficult it is to navigate its interface. In other words, how good a user interface is will not determine how valuable a product is (Derrett, 2004). If it is something a person desires to pursue, or something they need, then the perceived value will be high enough for that person to use that item or service. The frustrations associated with accessing and using government services is no exception, but as citizens, we all need access to such services and find ourselves navigating them no matter how complicated.
The aim of this article is to get designers, policy makers and product owners to think about how people’s emotional experiences drive their interaction with services, communities, and ultimately their perception of the brands and decision makers behind these things.
Emotional triggers are used to create experiences worth participating in. Knowing that an emotional yield is part and parcel of a successful experience is the first step to admitting that we have a responsibility to be ethical throughout the design thinking process.
Before going any further, I should note that demonstrating ethics doesn’t mean completely removing negative emotions from service design. In this article, I’ll come to explain the difference between positive and negative emotions and how both can be used to advance and hinder user experiences.
Whether we look at how singular and intense experiences, or small but frequent/recurrent experiences, affect our subsequent behaviours, decisions and actions, it is clear that emotion plays a significant role in how we rationalise our day-to-day. Not discounting the effect that affective disorders have too (beyond the scope of this article), the life events ordinary citizens must navigate alone have a natural compounding effect and is already a complex emotional landscape.
What of those then who experience trauma– a figure that is significantly on the rise– as we witness and experience a preponderance of worldwide human rights injustices, crime, and disasters like immigrant crises and the countless deaths of people trying to cross borders? And what about evolving social norms and technological trends that are changing our values and the way we communicate?
I’ll look at how some of these variables have influenced our understanding of emotion, how we process emotional events, and consequently how this has affected our attitudes and expectations. I’ll go into some research that shows how our capacity to feel certain emotions have been diminished over time, changing what we consider valuable, helpful, and considerate.
The power of emotion runs deep. You don’t need to look far to see its pervasiveness in almost every area of our relational lives. Our performance as employees, leaders, parents, policy makers, scientists and artists are measured on how well we cater to our professional and social circles, wider communities, and the decisions we make along the way that affect the world around us.
Attempting to define emotion
Recognised definitions of emotion
One of the earliest recognised definitions of emotion is Watson and Clark’s (1994), which the Interaction Design Foundation also leads with:
- a psychophysiological response, whether to external stimuli or a result of mental processes;
- a pattern of autonomic changes; and
- a distinct subjective feeling state.
Other proponents of the psychophysiological approach like Paul Ekman also place emphasis on the physical attributes of emotion where a physiological response (laughter, sweaty palms, anxious tummy, etc.) meets a facial expression (raised eyebrows, widened eyes, dilated pupils etc.). Paul Ekman’s work focused on the recognition of universal facial expressions of emotion, which Watson and Clark’s definition also incorporates.
The difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ is emotion
How many of you have been caught out trying to understand the difference between ‘effect’ and ‘affect’?
An effect occurs as a result of change. To affect a situation is to make a difference or have an impact that causes an effect, often by introducing an emotional element. In this way, we affect and induce a change in a person’s state, creating an effect in their outer appearance and how they choose to internally assess a situation.
It is the personal emotional experience we attach to an interaction or a thought that arms us with intention and the attention needed to drive us to action. In fact, the allocation of attention was once described as psychic energy (a concept from the 80s by Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton), because of its ability to set off a chain of events turning intention into action.
In other words, how well we respond to or adjust to an emotion regulates our outputs and the effects we have on the actions we take in the world around us– and we are having emotional responses all the time, to everything. Everything we do takes a level of drive and determination underpinned with enough feeling to succeed in causing an effect– whether desired, unintended, or not.
Having contemplated this topic for months now to write this piece and in numerous therapy and self-reflection sessions to live in peace, I’m still not convinced there is a total definition of emotion that truly grasps all our affective states. Like consciousness, it is one of those topics that unreservedly spans more than simple biochemistry and behaviour but is ingrained in a deeply subjective interpretation and philosophy of our personal experiences.
Metaphorically speaking, the emotional condition is as deep as an ocean
Emotion can lift you up, break you down, spin your world upside down, throw you down a rabbit hole, make you feel like you’re flying on Cloud 9, and everything in between. It is so powerful that some will ask you to sleep on it, or spend less time ruminating over something, lest you become over-zealous, or perhaps too apprehensive, afraid, or delusional that you cloud your judgement.
These metaphors exist because emotion is both an obvious and difficult concept to grasp. Our universal experience of emotion gives us common ground in how emotions are psycho-physiologically experienced. But our unique perspectives are informed by culture, expectations and prior personal experiences that come together to offer up different verbal and non-verbal expressions of those emotions.
With everything else going on in our hectic lives, it isn’t easy to understand what contributes to our attitudes- at least not without probing, dissecting and rationalising events. Ironically though, these are also activities that interfere with how emotional events are interpreted- first on an internal and cognitive level- before they are outwardly expressed.
Have you ever wondered where the concepts of ‘cooling off’ and ‘sleeping on it’ comes from? The science behind ‘sleeping on it’ contributes to better decision making by giving your brain space to process things more unconsciously during sleep, without the interference of emotions triggering a myriad of conscious thoughts.
“Sometimes the more consciously we think about a decision, the worse the decision made. Sometimes what’s needed is a period of unconscious thought — equivalent to ‘sleeping on it.’” (John M. Grohol, PsyD, founder of PsychCentral)
This is a phrase you may have encountered in day-to-day speech, usually to assuage someone in a heated scenario who looks like they’re about to say or do something they may regret later. It’s also a phrase that you may have seen in some terms of services and contracts. When you’re about to make a life altering decision like commit to a mortgage, or part with a large sum of money in exchange for an (un)guaranteed service, you’ll be glad not to gloss over this little protection clause.
The difference between emotions, moods and feelings
Even though we tend to group emotional experiences under the general term of ‘emotion’, the fact of the matter is that emotion is experienced in a variety of ways. The expression of emotion itself is a very short phenomenon spanning no more than seconds to a bit less than a minute. It needs its cognitive counterparts to become consciously experienced and understood.
Emotions are usually discovered or ‘felt’ through action, thought, desire and consequence. Alone, they are not consciously experienced. According to Ekman, if the experience of an emotion persists, it is likely that one is having recurring episodes of the same emotion.
Moods, on the other hand, linger for hours if not days, and tend to colour those days. It is important to note that both use different neural pathways in the brain. Therefore, moods and emotions can be experienced independently of each other, but the interrelationship between the two can complicate how we modulate and come to understand our feelings and reactions. The moods we fall into can start to look for excuses to provoke emotional reactions in a reinforcing attempt to prolong a mood, so the emotions that make sense also tend to follow more easily. For example, if you are in a bad mood, you may end up criticising your mother or partner’s cooking even if they’ve prepared your favourite meal (and know how to do it well). Your hunger may exacerbate this and suddenly you also feel disappointed — like life isn’t going your way. This vicious emotion-mood cycle may create cognitive biases that consequently affect our appraisals (Wong, 2016).
There might be nothing wrong (or everything wrong) with something you are interacting with, but the mood or disposition you’re in may well lead you, and others you give feedback to, to believe the opposite. Various biases as I’ll go over later like the halo or horns effect can cause this. Knowing that part of a designer’s toolbox is to demonstrate a user’s emotional state (for instance on an empathy map), while part of a user researcher’s job may be to embed an emotional narrative in the creation of a persona, it is important to know what affective state you are working with. Are you observing and capturing a momentary, classic emotional response, or lingering frustration built up over a longer period? Or what if an emotion on display has nothing to do with the subject you’re interested in, but is the effect of re-traumatization, or a neurodivergent trait?
Knowing that emotion is not experienced in a singular tone but is multifaceted should give researchers and designers more reason to be mindful of how they interpret emotion in their artefacts and the insights they present to decision makers.
The passivity of emotion and the involvement of cognitive and social constructs
There are a large range of emotions, especially when experienced alone, where there is little observable change to our outward appearance, leaving much of the experience up to our internal worlds. Observers become at the mercy of our willingness to share and display our feelings unless you’re a whiz at detecting micro-expressions.
It is safe to say that a definition of emotion is only adequate when its cognitive counterparts are accounted for (Ronald Alan Nash, 1989) since it is our perception and interpretation of what is going on in our environment that ultimately affects whether we exacerbate or reduce an emotional response. This cognitive processing is an internal activity that demonstrates the passivity of most emotional experiences.
Lingering subjective and mental aspects are what make emotions a uniquely individual conscious experience of our own value systems. So, an emotion is also defined as the process by which the brain computes the value of a stimulus (LeDoux, 2002). This complements Aristotle’s philosophical rhetoric that emotions are a judgement of value and people’s beliefs. As such, emotions are important because they serve as an appraisal of events.
And of course, the social constructs and community constraints we grow up with will also determine the place emotion has in our lives and the type of support that is given and received, for healthier exchanges of emotion. I explore how the occurrence of emotion has also evolved a bit later, when I come to discuss factors that affect emotional engagement but before that, let’s dissect what is actually going on when we feel.
What is actually going on?
When you feel hungry (internal stimulus– something from within you) and see food (external stimulus– something in your environment), the difference between deciding (cognitive response) to go for the food item (behavioural response) and eat or not (effect) is the emotional response that sets in you first. Imagine being offered cake. Now, how about fermented egg?
Depending on who you are, the situation you’re in, other affective states (you could be in a rebellious mood) and what your goal is (you might be a celebrity eating their way to victory in the jungle), different emotional responses will lead to different behavioural responses that emerge to predict the final effect.
How negative and positive feelings direct our attention
Associating a positive or negative emotion to an event can motivate us to act or cause us to stop in our tracks. They also commit things to memory more easily, which is why we tend to come back to the brands and services that we have affinity over. Similarly, recalling events becomes easier when there is a distinct and/or heightened emotional experience to pair it with.
Positive and negative emotions signal to us the likelihood of success we’ll have in handling a situation and this is important to keep in mind, because we experience emotion in our brains at faster rates than we logically process the event itself. That means that the average person will react emotionally first and foremost. This will be felt in varying degrees (sometimes not at all) before they respond and act both in thought and in demeanour.
Attaching goals and expectations to scenarios will also impact the emotional response a person may have, so it’s important to understand the relationship between a user’s goal and their desire and ability to attain that goal. If you put an obstacle in the way, you will frustrate your audience. An obstacle can be anything that prevents or strains your audience’s cognitive resources by demanding more of their attention and time or distracting them from reaching their end goal.
Depending on the context of your service, stimulating your audience in various ways may be a deliberate part of the journey. Such would be the case in a video game where inducing negative emotions can provide us with the much-needed boost to defeat that boss or conquer a quest.
In the real world, something similar is going on. Anxiety alerts us to perceived threats in our environment so that we are prepared to protect ourselves. In this context, anxiety drives us to make changes, take action. If our pursuit of a goal during that change still doesn’t get us closer to our desired result, we may experience anger that causes us to stop exhausting the path we are on. We begin to seek alternative routes, or perhaps none at all.
Emotion is the catalyst that redirects our energy when things aren’t going to plan. Negative emotions arm us with movement and activity, sometimes more than positive ones (again, context is king). When we are content in our ways and happy with the outcomes we have, we may retreat to rest, become complacent– and so a period of inactivity may follow. Being in a suspended state of positivity takes away the critical engagement usually required to complete mundane or more unpleasant tasks, such as filing a tax return.
Negative emotions in the right doses like risk aversion when it comes to potential loss support us in becoming more aware of our surroundings and consequently also more critical of the options presented to us. In such states, we are more likely to search for information and ways to complete whatever we’ve come to do in as quick a time and with as little mistakes as we can, so as not to have to repeat the process.
This applies to pretty much everything from doing your laundry to applying for a visa. The dread you feel may put you off these things leading you to avoid the situation for a while and do nothing, but once that feeling of dread grows large enough, or other frustrations creep in to compound how you feel (running out of clothes to wear; visa application deadline looming dangerously close), the more you will be compelled back into action. Ultimately, you know that the sooner you get through your laundry, the less loads you’ll have to wash and fold later, and the sooner you put in that visa application, the less worry you’ll have wondering if it’ll get issued in time for your trip.
Noticing details is easier when you’re in a slightly more uncomfortable position and that’s a good thing, because you want to remember what got you here in the first place and how to get through it more efficiently next time, perhaps on a more positive note as well. The exception to this involves trauma and post-traumatic stress, which can have the opposite effect and in severe cases skews attention and memory (Lynch and Lachman, 2020).
“People fear harm…(whether) physical or psychological, or both. Very often you feel fear in advance of harm. You fear both real and imagined threats of harm. You fear any event, person, animal, thing or idea that appears dangerous…The fear of danger, the anticipation of even physical pain, can often be more miserable than the pain itself.” (Ekman and Friesen, p 47).
Our impetus to choose different paths to a goal lies in our ability to process and recognise usually negative emotions. Without that, we run the risk of repeating behaviours that exhaust our resources for self-preservation. So, understanding how emotions are processed and turned into action is essential for understanding how users relate to products and services too, informing us of what could come next in their journey and why some decide to travel in a particular direction, or at a particular speed, and why others may decide to avoid a route altogether.
Applying this to the Product-Emotion Cycle
In the world of product and interaction design, the relationship between people and the items or products they engage with make up the ‘Product-Emotion Cycle’. This cycle delineates the evolving interplay between a user and a product during their interaction. A user’s initial emotional reaction shapes their subsequent behaviour towards that product; the product (powered by enough insight to dynamically respond) should adapt to that behaviour, which will either trigger or sustain the same or a new emotional response.
This process persists until the user has either successfully gotten what they came for or hits a block in the road. Successful products will elicit positive emotions aligned with their purpose and fulfil users’ expectations, but many designers may make the argument that a successful experience is not always one that yields positive emotions. Simply keeping users out of the red or keeping things emotionless can be more productive especially when it comes to public services.
Whilst you want to engage users in and encourage them to remain on your website, keep using your app, or to come back the next day to continue their journey, gratifying users with rewards at the wrong time or evoking too many positive emotions too early on can end up having the opposite effect further down the line if the outcome of your users’ journey with your service is not how they hoped it to be– or what you may have inferred it to be through your content or service’s design.
It’s crucial that designers and decision makers are aware of the impact even subtle nuances in their content and how they present their services can have on engagement and trust.
Imagine the billion-dollar lottery winner’s ecstatic response to the initial news of winning the mega millions jackpot: “You’ve just won the jackpot!” followed by the reality of a heavily taxed outcome.
Factors that influence emotion and our emotional engagement over time
When left unchecked, emotional triggers can grow in our cognitive representation of the events that triggered those feelings. That is to say that we start to look for evidence to support or assuage our feelings, which leads to changes in intensity, complexity, and duration.
Initial emotions we felt may have come to pass, but as we’ve committed them to memory, it’s easier to bring them up again through associated thoughts. And in thought, we continue to assess and then adapt our behaviour around our feelings and emotional disposition, creating a mood around our situation that becomes tougher to shift. Having entered a more passive state, this becomes tougher to detect by a researcher, or even a person’s friends and family in some cases.
Much like the build-up of conflict or trauma becomes all the more challenging to unpack in Psychotherapy the longer these things are left unattended, so can the frustrations and perceptions of citizens engaged with certain services. It becomes an even hotter topic when working with services that demonstrate a government’s position around public affairs. These come through in how services are designed– from predetermined rights people may need to have to access something and completing the steps in an application in a particular order, to how things are worded– this is all part of the design process that is rigorously tested to mitigate negative effects, which is usually complicated by the policies that public sector designers have to heed.
Emotional states arise because of an individual’s disposition, the state of their interpersonal relationships and the interactions in their environment. How anxious an individual is, how urgent their situation may be, the setting they are in, and the history that occupies their memories will often determine how things play out.
This bi-directional relationship between our desires, intent and what’s available in our environment, can determine our choice of products and services, and just as well the groups and communities we decide to become a part of.
It doesn’t matter how many positive reviews a service has received. If we experience challenges on our way to attaining said service, that will be the experience that sticks with us when we next come to reconsider if the journey or cost was worth the result– and consequently, whether we’d like to deal with the same organisation again. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how many red flags we come across if we’ve already set our desire for something in motion.
Sonos is a popular audio equipment manufacturer that’s known for its expensive speakers and high-quality sound. I recently decided to purchase a Sonos speaker off the back of this knowledge and many recommendations, despite reading that I could probably get a similar sounding speaker for a cheaper price if I went with a competitor. I also liked its design, so I ignored a couple of red flags and bought into the hype. But it is notoriously difficult to set up, has poor Bluetooth connectivity and a battery life that doesn’t make sense at its price point. Let’s just say that whilst I let the hype get the better of me and the sound is great, I probably won’t become a repeat customer due to how long it takes to both set-up and remain connected.
Our rational brain may wish to engage in logical activities to undermine our feelings and determine how good or bad something is for us, but the decision has likely already been made. In this sense, the notion of psychic activity is not unusual: An emotion that has already solidified itself in a person’s experience, when combined with a goal or intent, may well predict the outcome of that person’s decision making.
Psychological factors
There are numerous variables to call out– from health and affective disorders, neurodivergence and attachment styles to trauma. It won’t always be possible to scan for all these things, but in known cases when working with minorities, individuals or groups of people that have been through impactful or traumatic events, extra effort should go into safeguarding solutions and services intended to cater to these groups.
It is not enough to gather consent. Assess the impact that getting a research participant to relive their memories may have on their mental health. If you have not established rapport and ensured to participants that they are free to safely express themselves with confidentiality, anonymity, and without any consequences, then you risk retraumatizing individuals and probably won’t get far with sincere feedback either.
Disposition
This is another way of considering a person’s mood and the attitude they bring to a service in real time. A person’s disposition will certainly be influenced by their prior experiences in similar situations as well as expectations that frame their demeanour.
If a person expects to be treated poorly, they may approach defensively and with their guard up. It is also our responsibility to read any behavioural cues and body language to pick this up. Initiating a friendly conversation off the record to break the ice will help bring down some of these barriers, or at least clarify if something else is on their mind. Helping participants leave their stress at the door frees them up to engage more fully and authentically.
Situational factors
And of course, a service or product is going to be used in certain situations — some more pleasant than others. Imagine the difference between applying for a marriage certificate and a death certificate. While the process to do either may be mirrored in many ironic ways (we need to gather information about your partner and associated dates for example), both present totally different emotional scenarios.
Ethnographic research methods and observational field work is the closest we can come to understanding what people actually go through during these procedures, without influencing the outcome, but this is unfortunately not always a realistic way of attaining information.
Since user researchers don’t always find representative participants to test a service’s solution- for example those looking for asylum, or someone who has just lost their spouse– they may at best find participants who have already gone through the process and are willing to relive their journeys. It is equally important for researchers to keep in mind the limits of this approach. Recalling events from memory– while easier when there are emotional undercurrents– will often be inaccurate as is the case with eye-witness testimonies.
Otherwise, it is up to the empathetic design process put in place by service teams to infer how such persons may find and respond to such services that are often framed around infrequent life events. Yet it is often these large events when there is a lot at stake and emotions run high, and where we should be careful and considerate of patterns that trigger emotion through empathetic user research and content design, to properly support those who need to get through difficult events like bereavement where persons are going to be distracted, upset, still in shock and overwhelmed.
Technology, how we communicate, and the rise of AI
Technology influences our values, just like our emotions help us appraise events. So it’s no surprise that we have to look at what effects technology has on our emotions, especially considering its rapid escalation and prolific use, if we are to innovate responsibly (Steiner and Roeser, 2020).
Would you say that the changes in how we socially connect has led to a change in how we emotionally connect too? There used to be a time when a social event required in-person participation for it to truly be a social event. Nowadays, social connectedness very much resides online and we’ve been given new ways to share how we feel along the way, whether through emojis, memes or other interactive chat features. We can pick and choose how we represent ourselves and you’ll hear people talk about how a person’s online profile is often biased to show only what they want to reveal– often hiding life’s difficulties and emotional challenges. How does this digital layer change our perception of the world and how we relate?
We can decide to quantify happiness by counting likes, hearts and followers, or be frustrated by the commenter who fails to subscribe. How valuable is the user who follows your content, but does not purchase your goods? How seriously are we supposed to take emotional feedback received online?
Do you give more brownie points to the people who can maintain the same level of emotional connection online as they do in-person? For those old enough to remember a different time, how have your relationships changed or evolved since involving technology and the use of social media in your connections?
I used to think that the phenomenon of emojis and gifs, perpetrated by a much younger crowd, wouldn’t really make it past my generation of Millennials, but even older generations have developed a relationship and language of love with these digital linguistic artefacts. As with all things, it takes time for trends to normalise and whilst social media has transcended generations at different points in time, it’s interesting to note that there can still be a difference in how we emotionally relate to or use things like emojis.
I ran a little experiment with fellow user researchers and UX designers and asked them to interpret some common emojis. While many had similar descriptors for the selected emojis, there were also differences and nuances in some of the responses I received.
The ubiquity of technology may leave no stone unturned quickly enough. As we look towards a world that is also integrating artificial intelligence (AI), we will find ourselves contending with even more emotions as we learn to navigate how generative AI can either support us in our journeys or tear down what makes us authentic. With efforts going on to make AI more relatable so that its outputs become more emotionally mature, this also begs the question of how far away we are from experiencing sentient AI that can genuinely experience emotions.
Will AI reset our ability to connect emotively so that all this shallow emotional engagement online no longer matters? We ought to also ask if we are headed towards a world where AI will remain subordinate to our whims and creations, or to one that will recklessly allow it to supersede our own control– one day ‘consciously’ taking advantage of systems we put in place to create self-defence mechanisms in response to its own perceived threats. Remember how emotions serve an evolutionary purpose that helps us detect threats and the potential for harm. When we sense a threat, we can decide to shut down our senses and retreat to set up our barracks and forge a different plan, so to speak.
The equivalent AI could do the same by backing up its data to different servers, cloning itself, or any other combination of defensive responses it can use to safeguard against threats to its survival (should we decide to no longer indulge in our fascination and overzealousness of its infinite potential). Mo Gawdat, an AI pioneer and ex-Chief Business Officer at Google X declares this an emergency larger than climate change. I personally do not think that governments’ recent initiatives have taken this matter seriously enough. More needs to be done to regulate the availability of generative AI, and how it’s marketed and used before our own excitable, curious, and enthusiastic-for-tech approach (our emotions) ends up being our downfall.
We may not immediately approach this example thinking it has anything to do with emotion simply because backing up data to servers is a programmed, emotionless act, but as a developed feature born out of a need for security, why wouldn’t you? It is not irrational to think that an AI, with its ability to deeply absorb concepts that take us years to learn in seconds, doesn’t already understand this. And even if we believe it doesn’t, as would be the position of many, we are actively playing a role in enabling AI to understand emotions (and have been long before the world woke up to generative AI applications like ChatGPT). More recent examples of applications are Revoicer, a voice AI that can simulate emotion through its tone of voice, and all the work being done at MIT on computational empathy. It’s time for a mindset shift.
Evolving social values and changes in emotional tolerance
“One frequently neglected aspect is that social and technological change may profoundly affect the experience of emotions” (Scherer, 2001, pp. 134–136).
User-centred designers have to stay on top of introducing new technologies into designed experiences, but we don’t always know how they’ll impact users before we get asked to implement them. Part of our responsibilities is to mitigate the risks involved through continuous research and testing.
From pandemics to new policies, large scale citizen protests and technology changing how we work and communicate; our values, norms and self-ideals are being challenged. We’ve entered economic recessions, seen cost of living crises soar and are witnessing wars unfold from East to West.
Life has changed significantly, and for many people, these events have forced change, diminished control, and undermined values. The emotional responses and trauma citizens of the world are experiencing in reaction to such major events is unprecedented. An increase in social polarisation (citizens protesting) is a desperate cry of imbalance and injustices. Great lengths are being taken to express dissatisfaction- some more violently than others.
According to Scherer (2022), de-emphasising prosocial values and self-ideals may diminish the incidence of shame and guilt in modern society. By slowly replacing mechanisms of shame and guilt with fear of punishment for instance (even that is proving ineffective) and altering social constructs around what appropriates ‘shaming’, the incidence of experiencing shame itself changes. Arguably, ‘shaming’ has gone from a concept that had a constructive imperative– to get someone to stop and reflect on something unruly– to an experience that now triggers people on the receiving end to respond in more aggressive or derisive ways. This is a large shift in perspective.
In a time when we’re called to be more inclusive, it’s harder to create a recipe for shame or to feel guilt for being or behaving in ways once considered taboo. This has had positive effects in many ways, but it has also altered the appearance of these emotions in society. Perhaps perturbed by this shift, Plutchik, a thought leader in emotion, has excluded “Shame” from his Wheel of Emotion– a move he has since been criticised for.
Society is demonstrating its boldness through an increase in unreprimanded rule violations, immoral behaviours, sexual permissiveness and economic crime, suggesting that the modicum of fear of punishment in the socialisation process has not been an effective repellent. If we were once afraid to take part in activities that may induce feelings of shame and guilt, that is now no longer the case. Many are behaving without fear of punishment. We are instead more swayed by fears of getting ‘cancelled’.
In a similar vein, the incidence of ‘hate’ as an emotion is increasing. Communication patterns are changing thanks to technology where it’s become easier to direct hate through social media channels (often a political tool used to divide nations and create instability), threatening the mental and sometimes physical wellbeing of people online (Walther, 2022). There is a proposed function for ‘hate’, an emotion that has been argued to be reassuring and self-protective at an intergroup level, when it is based on the common perceptions of persons (Fischer et al.,2018). It seems that groups are choosing to align on having a negative disposition towards already devalued groups of people, finding comfort in a community that shares the same hateful perceptions, which in turn influences eliciting and regulating (perhaps also directing) incidences of hate. It’s been suggested that this phenomenon in and of itself gives us hints about how political extremism has grown.
Highlighting some critical issues for ethical design and innovation
As ethical user-centred designers, we want to avoid bias and strive to remain empathetic. This means that we must be open to the factors that interfere with people’s ability and desirability to complete a task, or speak candidly about how they perceive certain propositions, interact with content or other peripheral services. Not to mention other confounding personal variables from disabilities to diversity, cultural upbringing, socio-economic disadvantages, and trauma all play a role in a user’s disposition as we’ve already covered.
It is impossible to guarantee the control of all variables, but we can teach ourselves to take cues more seriously, ask the right questions, and take added measures to build comfortable research settings that will not pressure, aggravate or retraumatize users. Fostering trust and openness is crucial. Likewise, we need to be aware of how this work can also impact us and our own wellbeing.
Different biases that impact the evaluation of services
Ethnography and other qualitative research methods remain the researcher’s most effective way of thoroughly understanding and representing users, but in-depth one-on-one research or field work is also painfully slow, expensive, and not always possible. And when it is possible, we often run into what is called the law of small numbers bias: the belief that small sample sizes (as is often the case in qualitative research) are representative of the larger population.
On the other hand, quantitative methods like questionnaires that use scales asking you to rate any number of things can reach a much larger number of respondents and can also be used to derive sentiment. But these methods too are riddled with potential bias. Here are a few to look out for:
- Recency and primacy biases. We tend to put more weight on recent events than earlier ones- a tactic the media leverages all the time. Just think about how easy it is for us to forget about disastrous events the moment we’re introduced to something new and distracting.
Similarly, with the primacy bias we tend to remember and therefore give more importance to things that come first in a list. We intuitively know this, which is why we’ll often put the items we need to prioritise first on a shopping list, or gun for a top three spot when advertising our services.
In research, this can be controlled for by switching up the order of items on a list we want participants to review so that not every participant gets the same order.
- Halo and Horns biases. Emotion is contagious and so are its effects. You know the halo effect is in motion when one positive impression or delightful feature influences us to spread that positivity to other areas, even when those other areas don’t deserve praise. The horns effect does the same, but with respect to perpetuating negative opinions instead. We can remediate this by making sure that each feature of our service is questioned and tested separately, as opposed to allowing participants to generalise.
This is also how our positive and negative emotions and moods influence our judgements, as previously mentioned.
- Central tendency and leniency biases. We’re all guilty of choosing the middle ground when rating items on a scale of 1 to 5. Choosing 3 seems like a safe bet when we don’t want to overly disappoint or please, even if our choice does not reflect our true feelings.
Likewise, we can be lenient in our ratings and exaggerate a positive response by choosing a maximum score for similar reasons, consequently de-emphasising flaws, or ignoring them altogether.
Rather than use numbers, specific labels will assist (and force) respondents to be more decisive about what they pick.
- Similar-to-me and confirmation biases. Who doesn’t love coming across information that confirms their current beliefs? In fact, we search for it all the time. Having access to the internet and a plethora of forums, facts, opinions, and propaganda has only increased the odds of these biases manifesting.
Expect respondents to prioritise information that supports their beliefs and to rate others that remind them of themselves higher than others who don’t. There’s something and someone out there for everyone. We cling to those who share our views. Familiarity is a comfortable box. Diversify your user and focus groups to fight this bias.
There is also a lot to say about how AI can socially engineer and be used to unethically spread disinformation and discrimination, based on built in learning systems and inherent biases its fed. Manipulation has never been easier.
Learn more about the scales used in UX research and how to better design and analyse your research.
Social theories used in policy and their impact on user-centred design
Scientists and social researchers have been studying behaviour with respect to markets, economics and consumer value for as long as anyone can remember. Many theories have been developed over the years, some which have stuck more than others like behavioural economics and rational choice analysis. These social theories, which public policy is also one form of, have made assumptions on behaviour, cognition and decision-making that have influenced the way services and products have been designed and marketed.
However, we now know that there is misalignment of these social theories with current brain research (Verweij and Turner, 2022). Theories like rational choice analysis and the dual model systems of behavioural economics underestimate humans as social and emotional beings who are influenced by the social structures they live in.
We cannot talk about social theories like behavioural economics without going into nudge theory, which is the idea that our behaviour can be influenced by subtle intervention– a concept that has found its way incorporated into governments’ public policy work. Some 200 “nudge units” have since been set up worldwide to use behavioural sciences and ‘nudging’ to achieve their goals, with some studies showing that these strategies have been effective (Dellavigna & Linos, 2022), while others blame this on publication bias and cherry picking results.
Either way, while nudging in theory can be used for good and to support health initiatives like reducing smoking and obesity, there is concern that this approach undermines individual freedom when it comes to personal decision-making.
The best intentions of nudging are to get people to make decisions they would choose if they weren’t limited by their own rationality, but considering scientific doubt in the reliability of nudging and its dubious nature, it’s clear that nudging on its own misses the mark. Perhaps one of the largest criticisms of nudge theory is that it focuses on trying to make changes in individuals without properly considering the complexity of human nature, including the role emotion plays. This is a distraction from the larger picture that reform comes from making meaningful systemic changes that start with the policies themselves.
Public sector designers working with governments are going to be impacted by these issues in an attempt to introduce more empathy while battling the constant evolution of policymaking that adjusts the parameters of service and interaction design work achievable.
This becomes much harder to do when up against policies or strategies that don’t always align with the realities and sensitivities citizens face. It is a heavy burden on researchers and designers too who must face the emotional context of the work they participate in.
Whether we work towards improving the lives of those putting in life-changing applications for asylum, civil servants coming across contentious matters at the border, or the consequences of illegal immigration– to name a few examples– our own moral constraints, opinions, associations, and emotional conditioning will get in the way. By simply remembering this every time we engage in research and analysis, we will become better designers. My hope is that policymakers will see this too.
In conclusion, user centred design is incomplete without understanding emotion
Studying and understanding emotions allows us to zoom in on the motivations behind decision-making — a valuable addition to any user-centred designer’s arsenal. I’ve covered how user insights are translated to inform the evolution of products and services and how it’s our duty to report on the potential positive and negative effects our design solutions may have on intended audiences, especially those of us working in the public sector. How we share our insights and package propositions to key stakeholders and decision makers becomes ever more important, knowing the impact their policies and propositions have.
Understanding how emotions and different affective states like moods effect the way we respond to services (as service and product users) and how we strategize in our design work (as user centred designers and researchers) is not just important, but essential.
To sum up, we covered some of the more common variables like people’s psychology, situation and disposition that affect their emotional states, but also dove into less talked about topics such as how evolving social constructs and mechanisms like shaming (or lack thereof) are changing the way we experience certain emotions. I also went over the impact technology continues to have on us, shining light on the dangers of achieving a sentient, general AI in our futures that knows how to use emotion to its advantage and for its own survival. It remains our responsibility to remain ethical in the technologies we implement, particularly AI and its derivatives.
Beyond the service designer’s toolbox, we need to properly integrate the effects emotional discord can have on the services we produce and put out there, as well as the longer-term knock-on effects this may have on public perceptions, fuelling rife online where there are less inhibitions, and creating division in society. Being aware of the biases we face not only helps us design better research, it also helps us analyse feedback more discernibly when it comes to making recommendations on how to improve a service’s design.
Social theories like behavioural economics and the hype around nudge theory are examples of how the behavioural sciences have been used to implement policy and influence decision-making behaviour, but these are not necessarily backed by enough evidence, and studies within the social and affective neurosciences have shown how such theories underestimate the social, emotional nature of humans.
Finally, I thank and invite you to join me in advocating for more empathetic and ethical product design that not only adds value to society but is considerate of the emotional experiences we co-create together.
