Design by emotions
How to use people’s personalities in user experience design.
No. This is not about design for emotion.
We are talking about design by emotion.
More specifically, we are looking at the use of people’s personalities (so, there is still some emotion involved) in the designing of products or services…
It was during the 2017 Flupa UX Days in Paris, that I was fortunate enough to hear Emmanuelle Marévéry (co-founder of Colorlink) speak about the use of personality studies in a design context. Having previously been part of Décathlon’s packaging design process, Emmanuelle brought to the conference notions of psychology and cognition applied to a user centered process.
Why study personality?
The starting point of Emmanuelle’s talk made reference to her first days working at Décathlon. She was surprised to see that the color palette for B’Cool bikes was decided solely by the product manager. There wasn’t any dialogue with the rest of the team or any user panels either, so, Emmanuelle organized a Focus Group in store, with a few hundred women.
The results? Most clients’ favorite color was red, their favorite bike color was turquoise, the model they would buy for themselves was white, and if they were to purchase one as a present, they would choose black, yet the most sold model was gray…
Does this seem illogical to you? Yes?
Actually, it isn’t really, and this kind of situation is more than anecdotal.
No. We are not rational.
We are making decisions daily, in every moment, sometimes without even knowing it. From the most insignificant of actions (choosing a drink from a vending machine) to the most difficult decisions (quitting your job), our cognitive system is being solicited … Yet, our lazy brain does not want to spend time weighing the pros and cons. It would use far too much energy! It therefore relies as much as possible on our past experiences and pushes us to create habits in order to accomplish actions that require minimal effort.
Keep in mind, our decision making process takes into account multiple factors. It must juggle our intrinsic motivations, the factual information that we pick up on and what is imposed to us by our social environment. Between personal preferences, wants, how we wish people perceive us and what we do, etc. a lot of time can go by between the moment we want to do something and the moment we actually do it.
For psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a specialist in cognitive psychology and author of Thinking fast and slow, our brain follows two kinds of processes : a quick and intuitive one that corresponds to the emotional part of our brain, and a slower, logical and thought out process, which corresponds to the cognitive part of our brains. These two systems work together, in order to adapt to different types of decision making.
How does this relate to user experience design?
As designers, it’s primordial that we understand the behaviors of the users we are designing for. User research and interviews are important tools to help us pin point individuals’ pains and issues.
Unfortunately, we are never completely safe from that pesky thing called cognitive bias (a thought mechanism that influences our judgement).
When we are asked to recall a specific task or behavior from a particular situation, we tend to “rationalize it retrospectively” (Damasio, 1991). Interviewed users therefore tend to analyze their actions while also trying to find rational reasons for them.
As designers, we are not immune to this ourselves. Emmanuelle Marévéry mentions, for example, the bias of fake-consensus, which leads us to believe that others think the same way as we do and therefore make assumptions about their behavior based on our own. This is not to be ignored in user experience design: we cannot take the risk of basing things on our own personal experience (we are not those for whom we are design our products).
So, what can we do to best equip ourselves in understanding our users?
The study of users’ personalities appears to be an interesting solution.
Personality, what is that?
Personality…
“Is a privileged combination (pattern) of behaviors, emotions, cognitions and attitudes (traits) that are relatively stable for a given individual (core)”. (Hansenne, 2007)
It is based on this understanding that Emmanuelle Marévéry presents personality. This definition tells us that beyond our unique traits, personality is also and especially a combination of several aspects of our being, characterized by a relatively unchanging temporal aspect. With this, she put together “a list of qualities that allows us to distinguish ourselves from one another”.
For Judith Harris (1999), personality is 50% from our genes, 40% from our experiences, 10% from our parents and stabilizes around our mid 20s to 30s. It therefore makes sense to consider one’s personality based on their cultural background (we know, for example, that extraversion is valued more in occidental cultures).
A red string.
For Emmanuelle, personality is like a red string that connects the different components of the decision-making process: emotions, perception of reality, values and intrinsic motivations, and mechanisms of cognition.
See here:
- Personality impacts your emotions (extraversion creates more positive emotions) and therefore the way we perceive the world,
- Emotions encourage the expression of certain personality traits (anger encourages impulsive behavior),
- Emotions influence how we see things (fear affects auditory focus),
- Perception influences emotions (the color red for excitement),
- Our emotions affect our cognition (sadness leads to pessimistic views and interpretations), etc.
From a user experience perspective, the study of personalities gives us a key to understand our users in a universal and re-creatable way. It can even lead us to anticipate their reactions when faced to a product or service and therefore fine tune the designing of memorable and targeted experiences.
Let’s take an example.
In order to show us the usefulness of knowing your user’s personalities, Emmanuelle used the example of a fairly recognizable personality trait: introversion vs extraversion.
She goes on to explain that on one hand, an extroverted person will be more trusting and optimistic, will prefer to express their energy outwardly and towards others, is always looking for newness, activity, establishing new contacts, to go towards others, etc. On the opposite side, an introverted person is comfortable with themselves and prefers to direct their energy inwardly or towards solitary activities.
How can we anticipate the behaviors of extroverted people in UX Design?
Here’s what we know:
- They prefer speed to correctness
- They explore interfaces in a chaotic manner
- They have more positive reactions than average
- They tend to prefer warmer colors (red, yellow…)
Some have been able to implement these studies into their strategy. Candy Crush is one such example where these principles are used to improve its gaming system. The way and the frequency at which people play the game have been used to define what feedback to give players, based on their personality:
- Conscientious introverts play in a slower and more efficient way. Rewards are given when they play well.
- Extroverts play fast and get bored fast. Rewards are sent randomly.
How can we find out users’ personalities?
By (simply) relying on tools used in psychology, such as the Big Five, Neo-pi-R or even EMS 28.
All these tests have for ambition to define an individual’s personality by relying on a certain set of values (5 for the Big Five and 19 in the latest questionnaire by Schwarz).
Emmanuelle recommends using these methods at the beginning of a project to save time during the user interview phase. In particular, if the personalities of the personas are well defined, it will make it much easier to select testers and offers the luxury to do fewer interviews. This is on the basis that behaviors associated to certain personalities will be replicated.
Offering part of a questionnaire to fill out (only part as the full questionnaires tend to be quite long) to your users can be a good way to define their personalities, split them into different groups, and consequently interview them based on it.
To Summarize
Why should we take interest in our users’ personalities?
- To explain the reasons for certain behaviors and help predict future behaviors,
- Divide your users based on objective and measurable parameters, and therefore affect them more by adequately presenting the brand identity,
- Be more effective during user tests by avoiding biases linked to personality types (someone open to new things might not be the most pertinent to test an innovative product…)
- Make more effective personas by adding emotions, needs and motivations to them.
Even though we tend to define user personalities intuitively, it is surely more judicious to rely on tools specifically developed with the use of statistics.
You can find the slides from Emmanuelle’s presentation here.
A big thank you to Noëlle for the translation.
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