How to (re)introduce feel-good emotions into digital products

In the dawning age of AI, Michael Feeney, Art Director for Product Design at Zalando, shares practical tips and exercises to humanise the design process.

The AI train has well and truly left the station, and it’s getting faster every day. Recognising the potential of artificial intelligence to take tech to seemingly infinite destinations, naturally, the industry’s innovators are keen to get on board. We’re seeing how sophisticated AI technologies can automate many design tasks and help us create more personalised experiences. Yet, we must also be conscious of the ‘why’s behind integrating them into our processes.

AI was the pertinent theme of this year’s Design Matters conference, which brought together the global community of digital creatives to deep dive into the topic. When Michael Feeney, Art Director for Product Design at Zalando, was invited to deliver a workshop, he saw it as an opportunity to cultivate a more human perspective, focusing less on the technology and more on the people behind it.

“The AI topic is often focused on speeding up workflow by simplifying time-consuming processes,” he explains. “I wanted to flip the subject on its head a little and say, ‘Before we even discuss AI, can we discuss how we do things in this industry as humans?’. In the tech industry, we must respond to tight deadlines and meet KPIs, leading us to enter solution mode quickly. AI could be a means to reach an outcome faster. However, from my perspective as an Art Director for Product Design, it is essential to be intentional, whatever our method. What if we take a moment to ask ourselves questions like, ‘How do we want to feel working on this project internally? And how do we want others to feel when they experience it externally?’”

Michael’s graphic design background honed his sensitivity to emotional design. He switched industries six years ago, transferring his skills as an Art Director to product design at Zalando. In his holistic role, he ensures the translation of our design principles and intentions across the experience to offer a consistent and emotional customer journey.

“To continue to create products that resonate with humans, we must humanise the process beforehand.”

Michael’s Design Matters workshop focused on (re)introducing feel-good emotions into digital products to provide the best possible experience for a wide range of customers. The participants looked into ways to make any digital experience more exciting, memorable, and fun, narrowing the gap between real-life and digital experiences. Michael believes understanding emotions is a crucial first step of any design process that we should not overlook when using AI and other technologies. To continue to create products that resonate with humans, we must humanise the process beforehand.

How can we all bring more life and vibrance to the experiences we design, while deeply connecting with our customers? Read on for all the insights from Michael’s workshop.

Insights at a glance

• Look to the past to revive design moments that brought excitement
• Gain precision by taking time to intuitively investigate emotions
• Uncover nuances by redefining what you think you already know
• Step into the customer’s shoes to understand the right time to inject emotion
• Advocate for emotional design within cross-functional collaboration
• Before using resources and tools, check in with yourself to deeply understand core emotions

Draw inspiration from the past

To see the way forward, we must first look back. Revisiting founding ideals helps sharpen our purpose and values. The applications and websites we used at the dawn of the internet are hard to forget, largely due to multiple customisation possibilities.

“Early digital experiences were more human because it was all new,” says Michael. “Back then, our only references were analogue, so we tried to replicate that in digital. Theming, skinning, and customisation enabled people to make it their own.”

Acknowledging that UX practices, accessibility, and coherency have greatly improved since the ’90s and ’00s, Michael began the workshop by asking how we might draw inspiration from the memorable elements in modern digital products. “Though we can all agree many digital products serve a functional purpose first, the standardisation of designs in recent years makes little space for excitement.”

Now that artificial intelligence has arrived, what constitutes the spark of humanness has come more into focus. “Machine-driven processes could easily make design even drier. However, as with all technological shifts, AI could also be an opportunity to break through conventions and re-evaluate our approach. Let’s look at everything we have done and see how we, as humans, can improve upon it with the tools at hand.”

Understand emotions before representing them

Creativity is naturally messy. Comparing his experience in graphic design to product design, Michael believes the highly organised and structured nature of the tech industry can limit the plasticity and divergence that lead to new ideas. Likewise, the conventions of the corporate world might distance us from the raw emotions we wish to convey in our products.

“I wanted us to think about how we define our intentions and emotions internally. Because how can we successfully convey something to our customers if we haven’t first tried ourselves to get to the raw emotion of it? Before jumping to the drawing board, it’s always recommended to tap into the meaning of the intended emotions.”

Emotions are harder to pin down than we might initially assume. Michael asked the participants to take two minutes to think of a recent situation that felt good for them and to sum it up in one word.

“If understanding emotions was easy, therapists would be out of a job. Sometimes, it’s challenging to understand and define them, but it’s necessary in order to represent them in the best way possible. It was interesting to see people realising the situation they chose led to that specific emotion. They might not have had a chance to fully unravel it.”

Michael presented an example dialogue exploring a negative emotion that is typically challenging to navigate: overwhelm. “By asking ourselves follow-up questions, we can be more precise in interpreting and describing emotions.”

Redefine the buzzwords

When a word is repeated many times, it can lose its essence. In tech, we are so used to hearing ‘engaging,’ ‘exciting,’ and ‘memorable’ in our briefs that they become buzzwords. “We don’t even question them and go straight into solution mode,” says Michael. In the second exercise, he asked the participants to create their own definitions of these words in a group discussion without looking them up online. Here’s what they came up with.

“For ‘engaging,’ they landed on feeling involved, something interactive, something you want to return to. ‘Exciting’ was feeling anticipation and the surprise of not knowing what you are going to get. We realised ‘memorable’ doesn’t always have to be a very positive emotion, but that it will leave a positive mark in the end.”

Similarly to the first exercise, this activity demonstrated the power of being inquisitive about what we think we already know. Redefining a word through the emotional responses it evokes could help us deliver these nuances in the experiences we create.

Consider the time and place

Once we have taken time to understand the emotions we want to elicit, the next step is considering when it would be appropriate to introduce them. Michael gave some scenarios in which the timing could make or break the customer experience.

“I included very functional scenarios because often digital products are there to make our lives simpler. The idea is not to make everything exciting at all times, but to look at functional moments and make sure that we can still inject little moments of joy.”

One example was a customer on holiday buying a train ticket to visit another city. “If they are in a rush, it would be inappropriate for the ticket machine to say, ‘Would you like to discover more places in the region?’. Imagine they managed to buy their ticket. When they hand it to the controller, they see the message, ‘We hope you made it on time.’. It gives them a nice little moment of validation. If they did not make it on time, the message would at least make them feel acknowledged. It almost serves as an apology.”

Michael asked the group to brainstorm more of these scenarios together. An interesting example they came up with was a customer choosing a playlist on a music streaming app for their morning run.

“In this example, the user is not necessarily relying on the product to always bring them joy, but more on what the product can do to bring them joy. For running, most people want to play something upbeat that keeps them going. An appropriate moment would be to automatically select the music they like that is higher than a certain BPM. An inappropriate moment would be to have a long flow requiring them to specify mood or speed, or showing what their friends listen to. This process might frustrate them so much they don’t even want to go for their run anymore.”

We can also harness the expertise of engineering and data teams to uncover moments we can anticipate the user. In this example, we could look for past signals that might indicate that, around this time, the user looks for high-intensity playlists or has searched ‘workout.’

Michael dedicated most of the workshop time to this exercise for good reason. It was a strong reminder that, in product design, great intentions don’t always lead to great results. When it comes to navigating emotions, it is crucial to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes.

It is also our responsibility to represent these sensitivities when collaborating within cross-functional teams. “I believe everyone we work with should embark on this journey of understanding and discussing emotions.”

Check in with yourself first

What about the visual ways to introduce feel-good emotions into digital products? There are many online resources on colour psychology, shape associations, typography, and more. However, Michael pointed out that before we apply any of these known techniques and approaches, checking in with ourselves makes such a difference.

“I didn’t bring any online resources to help us translate emotions into digital products because we all know about them already. The point of the workshop was not necessarily how to translate emotion, but rather to more deeply understand core emotions before we do so.”

This humanised process also applies before using AI. Through a side-by-side comparison of two mobile interface designs generated by AI, Michael demonstrated that very long and detailed prompts are more effective than short prompts because they result from a deeper initial understanding.

“Long prompts mean we have already done some of the work by identifying what the emotions are, what they mean, and how we can translate them. Then AI can take this interpretation and create results that are much more aligned with the feeling we had in mind.”

Michael ended the workshop on an encouraging note. The integration of machine-driven processes into the product design workflow is inevitable. However, the emotional intelligence required to convey tangible human emotions rests with us. When we create experiences with empathy, openness, and a human touch, we are sure to make our customers feel not only good, but understood.

Do you have any tips on how to introduce positive emotions into digital products? We would love to hear them in the comments. Next, we discuss how the digital products we design and build can influence a more inclusive future.