Using Emotions in Design Processes to Improve User Experience

Creating designs that delight customers can help you gain a competitive edge and accelerate growth. Design plays a crucial role when it comes to communicating your message to your target audience.

Repetitive processes and monotonous designs can lead to boredom and leave a negative impact in the mind of the customer; causing users to lose interest in your website or app.

You are probably aware of the short attention spans that people have today and how difficult it is to showcase your products in a limited amount of time. However, companies that empathize with their customers and establish emotional connections gain a significant advantage over the competition.

The key here is to create designs that are in sync with your user personas and are able to send a clear message without any interference.

Dopamine!

Known as a neurotransmitter—Dopamine is a chemical responsible for transmitting signals between neurons. It is released in the body when a person learns about rewards or receives something good unexpectedly. The sudden availability of positive reinforcements improves its secretion and often this is associated with pleasure-inducing activities.

When it comes to design elements, emotional responses such as Facebook likes, new followers on Instagram, emojis and more inculcate a similar feeling of pleasure. They are a key player in a person’s subconscious and resonate with the changing stimulus in the environment.

A classic example of emotional stimulation is Facebook’s memory feature. It connects with users at an emotional level and also leaves memorable impressions while inducing a certain level of pleasure.

Let’s look at the factors that can create emotional interference in your designs and how you can use different techniques to create a better product.

Gamification

Gamification has been used on different websites and mobile apps to create a more engaging environment. Gamification refers to including game-like features into a website or app environment. It can also mean adding humor and illustrations in the mix to create a user-friendly layout and encourage users to use your website or app more often.

You can include different types of rewards and achievements to motivate users, including:

• In-app challenges
• Points
• Badges
• Stickers
• Leaderboards
• Journey indicators

Gamification is a new way to build emotional connections with audiences and reduce cognitive load for your customers.

Benefits of creating emotional designs

When you are able to elicit appropriate emotions, you create a positive user experience on your website or app. The idea is to create a connection between users and products. Positive emotions influence user perception of your brand. Some notable benefits include:

• Easy understanding of your brand
• Visually appealing designs for website and apps
• Enjoyable user experiences
• Memorable impressions in the mind of the user
• A feeling of personal association with the brand

Humans are able to establish emotional connections on three different levels:

• Visceral
• Behavioral
• Reflective

Let’s talk about these three levels one at a time:

• The visceral emotional design represents the user’s first impressions about a product and deals with aesthetics.
• The behavioral emotional design deals with the usability of the product and assessed on basis of how well the desired functions are incorporated and their ease of use.
• The reflective emotional design is concerned with the outcomes after a product has been used and the value it provides to the user.

To Wrap Up

Humans haven’t evolved to endure boredom or do repetitive tasks for a long time and that is the reason emotional stimuli needs to be a part of your design.

Drive your brand with empathy-based emotional designs!