Design for Emotion with Mindsets
How we used mindsets to design for emotion and meet our users’ needs
By Róisín Bowden, UX Researcher, Workday
Introduction
Have you had a moment in your career when you’ve needed to communicate with human resources? Perhaps you needed help from HR when you were experiencing a significant life event. This might have been for something joyful, such as preparing for the arrival of a new baby. But maybe it was for something that provoked more challenging emotions, such as a health issue. In these situations, you needed emotional intelligence, confidentiality and reassurance from HR, rather than simply an exchange of information.
As a UX researcher, I was recently confronted by these challenging emotions of our users. While working as part of a multidisciplinary product team, our objective was to create the employee experience of reaching out to your HR team for help. It was clear from our initial user interviews that understanding the full range of emotions they encounter at work was crucial to providing them with a successful user experience — we needed to design for emotion to build the right experience.
Enter Mindsets
We set ourselves the goal of creating an empathy tool that would allow us to consider the full range of emotions of employees at work. A “mindset” is ideal for this purpose, as it visually represents a range of emotions experienced by the user when they interact with a product. This artifact can then be used in design and research activities to ensure we consider the full emotional range of our users and prioritize our product work. It allowed us to wield empathy by spending time in the mindset of our users. This is our interpretation of mindsets:
We chose to focus on intensity of emotion and time pressure. From our research, we knew these two traits had the most impact on employees’ mindsets when they are reaching out to HR. From these traits, we then created a graph of four mindsets that represented emotional states relevant to the experience we were creating. Each of the four mindsets had a number of associated scenarios that emerged from our initial user interviews. For example, here is a scenario for the distressed and stressed mindset:
You have been experiencing persistent stress at work, which is affecting your everyday mental health. You’ve tried to speak to your manager about this, but nothing has changed. You are feeling anxious and exhausted and you urgently need to speak in confidence with someone in HR.
Imagine you are in this mindset; these emotions would most likely have an effect on your cognition and you would require a different experience from the product than if you were in the rushed but feeling fine mindset. Incorporating mindsets into our design development empowered us to incorporate emotion-driven design into our employee experience.
The Power of Mindsets
Mindsets were uniquely appropriate for this design challenge, because they take into consideration the swiftly changeable nature of the user’s emotional state. Our emotions are constantly in flux. By choosing emotion as an essential trait for our mindsets, we could incorporate the changeable nature of our human emotions into our design process. No employee is in one mindset all of the time; they shift between mindsets as pressures and emotions change over the course of the week, day, or even hour. In this way, mindsets distinguish themselves from other empathy artifacts, as they have the power to capture emotional shifts over shorter time intervals.
Because of their ability to capture changes in emotion, mindsets are a powerful compliment to personas. Personas are without a doubt an essential tool for capturing the behaviours, needs and goals of the user. However they remain static over time, and as such cannot capture the pressures and emotions the user is experiencing in any given moment. Mindsets make personas dynamic.
For example, imagine a product team with three personas representing their users. Each of these personas experiences their own time pressures and emotional states when interacting with the product. The team could create mindsets for each persona, adding a powerful layer of emotional understanding to each persona. Alternatively, they could decide that all three personas experience a similar range of pressures and emotional states. In this case, the team could create just one mindset that spans across all three of their personas. In either case, the addition of mindsets would add a powerful layer of emotional understanding to the team’s existing research artifacts.
How We Used Mindsets
Mindsets for Generative Research
The simplicity of our mindsets meant they were versatile enough for us to incorporate into a variety of design and research activities. One example is how we used our mindsets during a generative research workshop. The aim of our workshop was to understand how the employees’ desired experience changed while interacting with our product, depending on which mindset they were experiencing. First, we asked the participant to embody one of the mindsets, perhaps by remembering an experience of their own that they’ve had in this mindset. Next, we presented them with a common scenario which would likely evoke this particular mindset. Finally, we asked the participant to walk us through what their ideal experience might be when reaching out to HR. For example, one participant imagined themselves in the distressed and stressed mindset, experiencing a sudden bereavement in the family and needing immediate time off work. The journey they constructed revealed to us how their desired experience was distinctly different from that of an employee who simply needed HR assistance.
Mindsets for Design Ideation
We also applied our mindset artifacts effectively during the early design stages. In one of our design ideation sessions, our goal was to quickly produce a large number of ideas that would form the basis of our employee experience of communicating with HR. First, we chose the mindset that we decided was a priority to design for in this session. Then, we chose a scenario that would likely evoke this mindset for our users. Next, we chose a flow that the user would frequently encounter. Finally, we set a timer and sketched our design ideas as quickly as possible! In this situation, the mindset allowed the team to quickly empathise with our user’s emotional state in a specific moment. Here, the use of mindsets provided focus for our design work, allowing us to generate a large amount of ideas for a range of emotional states. Also, by focusing on the mindset of our user rather than their job role, we found our own mindsets were more open and empathetic, which unquestionably contributed to our creative thinking during the session.
Mindsets for Prototype Validation
One final example of how our mindsets allowed us to see our designs through a different lens was how we incorporated them into prototype testing. While crafting our tasks for a prototype test, we decided to create tasks based on the variety of mindsets the employee might experience when interacting with this prototype. For example, one task was based on the sensitive self-carer mindset, in which the employee needed to reach out to their HR team to discuss their work leave options due to an underlying health condition. This allowed the participant to easily understand the emotions they might feel when faced with this task. The participant then drew our attention to the need for confidentiality within the interaction with HR, an insight that validated our previous assumptions. As the prototype we tested was designed with mindsets taken into consideration from the start, incorporating the mindset into our prototype testing allowed us to validate this work. This ensured we designed for emotion iteratively throughout the design process, and not just the early brainstorming stages.
So why is designing for emotion important?
From these examples, it’s clear that using mindsets was crucial to the success of the product, as it allowed us to design for the emotions of our users. But why is it important to design for emotion when designing software for the workplace?
Because emotion-driven design is one step towards enabling workers to bring their full selves to work. In our modern workplace, many of us believe that expressing emotions is unprofessional or out of place. As Don Norman points out in his book Emotional Design: Why we Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, we often pit cognition against emotion and consider emotions to be out of place in polite society. But emotions are inseparable from and a necessary part of cognition. Therefore how can we expect our users to feel empowered to bring their full selves to work, if our workplace software does not allow for this expression of emotion?
I am aware however that designing products with emotion in mind can only go so far. Good product design alone cannot enable workers to bring their full selves to work; the culture of the organization must also empower users to do so. We can only expect our users to be vulnerable while using a product if they trust the organization will respond in an appropriate manner. But designing emotion into our products is a step in the right direction.
Next Steps
Through the use of mindsets and emotional design, we were better able to accommodate our users’ range of emotional states at every step of the product development process. However this experimentation with mindsets raised more questions that need further exploration. How can mindsets be designed so that they compliment personas? In which design briefs is it most appropriate to consider emotions of the end users, and when is it less of a priority?
How do you design for emotion in your own work? What form do your empathy artifacts take? We encourage you to try mindsets as an empathy tool if you haven’t done so already. We would love to continue this conversation and learn about the experience of the wider community.
