Should your product feature an emotional design?
We live in the era of engineering, science, and technology. Most of the focus in our society go in terms of reason and maths, while emotions are seen as something negative, and, therefore, developers tend to forget about them.
If you show emotions, you are seen as weak, so, for that reason, you should separate Heart from Brain and never ever mix them. We see ourselves as logical creatures, but is it really bad to have an emotional side?
Why should Emotional Design be something to consider? Emotions have a huge impact on decision-making and they even allow to remember events that happened in our childhood, for example.
To build a great relationship with users engineers need to remember that they are dealing with emotional beings and should target not only a great software but also an emotional design.
What does it mean?
Emotional Design means to design with an emotional intent. Is about building a design that concentrates in personal concerns and values. It’s a mindset that should be applied while creating an application to make sure users will appreciate your product.
Most users don’t care about the quality of your software, they care about if it’s useful to them and if it’s worth keeping. (Click to tweet)
Is functionality enough?
This belief that says that having a powerful and functional product is enough to guarantee that people will use it, is beyond wrong! In real life, looks matter. Sorry.
People will prefer something that is pretty and clean to look at. If your competitor has a better design, you can bet that users will prefer to use it.
In today’s advanced technology market, functionality is not enough. That has become the easiest thing to accomplish with the rising of so many engineering experts. The real problem is to catch the user’s attention. And to do that, it’s compulsory to build for them. To build something that they will love, use and recommend.
How do emotions influence user experience?
Just think about those days when you wake up on the “wrong side of the bed” and literally everything you try to do goes wrong.
You fall, you burn yourself with coffee while taking breakfast, you delete an important document for your boss… just like a curse. And then it becomes so easy for you to get mad! You find yourself shouting at your computer because you didn’t plug it in… I mean, the same happens to users. If they are having a bad day it’s more likely to focus on the negatives and get angry at your app. “I can’t find the freaking search bar” or “Where are my old files??”.
Keep this in mind when developing your application, try to create positive emotional responses by developing an intuitive and clean structure. Place specific help points for these situations so that, when they need a bit of guidance, they can find it immediately.
Build especially for your users, attend to their needs and interact with them. Lastly, build something that is beautiful and freaking easy to use.
Logic will never change emotion or perception.
– Edward de Bono
