Notes from #WebSummit: Creativity, love, and happiness
How do we factor happiness into design and how do we measure it?
Details
Date: November 7, 2017
Time: 14:35
Conference stream: Creatiff
Speakers
Pamela Pavliscak, Founder, Change Sciences
Jacob Greenshpan, UX Strategy Consultant, Google
Ethan Imboden, Head of Venture Design, Frog
Martin Swant, Writer, Adweek
Web Summit Summary
How does design affect us fundamentally? As companies vie for our time, designing for creativity, love, and happiness is key to understanding our relationship with technology.
Main Theme
When we design products, we should measure emotions as part of the design process. Part of the challenge is in understanding and accepting every person’s definition of happiness is different.
The Key Quote
“Often, people don’t have the goal of generating an emotion, but rather, generation an action.”
- Ethan Imboden
Key Points
- When designing products, we measure for efficiency, convenience, and productivity. When we account for emotion, we need to think outside the one way we currently think about it: delight.
- Emotion sensing technology can help create experiences that allow us to express ourselves more broadly; current technologies are a bit more limited and can dehumanize us.
- Cultural context will influence emotions. Qualitative research will help you understand these emotions better. Large and small companies can both benefit from this approach.
Reflections
I think of the layers of opportunities available to us to inspire delight and bring about positive emotions from our users in our products — from the smile you can put on someone’s face by having a monkey high-five you at the end of an arduous user flow (high-five to you, MailChimp), to the feeling of accomplishment you can create for your users by turning a process that’s normally intimidating and unapproachable into something they can easily understand and instantly begin reaping the benefits from (looking at you, Wealthsimple). I’d love for project teams to be inspired to create goals that have their users’ happiness in mind.
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