February 2025
Service Design
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“Honesty is creeping into the personalities we craft for our businesses, and our users are beginning to expect the websites and web applications they visit to reflect a personality that they can relate to.”
After reading discovering the ‘A Book Apart’ collection via Erika Hall, I opted to give Aaron Walter’s “Designing for Emotion” a read; it turned out to be a relatively short book with a lot of incredibly important takeaways.
The single most important takeaway from this volume comes from the adaptation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: interfaces must be functional, reliable, and usable (this last trait is often hard to define). In many scenarios, such as online banking, humans are performing tasks that otherwise might be completed by another human being. The nature of these tasks being completed digitally requires a certain level of care in order for users/customers to trust a digital system. In other words, it should feel to users as though they are, in fact, dealing with a human being and not a computer. The computer element of the process should “recede into the background.”
Making a computer seem human can be an incredibly challenging project, especially when lacking key information about users. There are countless aspects to consider: brand tone/voice (UX Writing), interactions of lack thereof (Design), how technical a page can be (Dev/PM/Design), etc. Aaron Walter gives an incredible introduction to emotional design via case studies from MailChimp and select other organizations.
For the same reason storytelling is the most common and effective way to present information in the design world (among others), designing for emotion accomplishes the same notion:
“Emotionally charged events persist much longer in our memories and are recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories.”
Not only do user satisfaction and trust increase, but these experiences become much more memorable among targets audiences. Walter talks about the implications of this; he goes so far as to say that the jobs of marketing teams (and customer support teams) became substantially easier when the product itself is more delightful to use.
At some point or another, things will likely go wrong; it’s best to prepare for these situations than attempt to recover after they’ve happened (hello Disaster Management). With this in mind, Walter states:
“Emotional engagement before and even during a major event can help mitigate the risk of losing your audience.”
He talks about Flickr’s 2006 outage in which they had a coloring competition to displace negative emotions users were correctly having about the situation; it ended up turning into a huge success and source of positive emotion - likely because of the Rosy Effect. This isn’t easy to do and must be done carefully if disaster does strike. In addition to trying to put a positive spin on the situation, it’s most important to: 1) explain the situation clearly, 2) communicate how it’s being remedied, and 3) update users regularly (even if there isn’t much to update with).
Many companies use Atlassian’s Statuspage (or similar alternative) nowadays to communicate outages and errors; these pages are dedicated websites to combat issues exactly like this (see below). One of the most compelling arguments for prioritize designing for emotion resides in the following:
“The forgiveness we earn through careful emotional design can prevent considerable losses in customers and revenues, which is alone a compelling enough reason to incorporate it into our design process.”
I read this on a whim after thoroughly enjoying other books from the ‘A Book Apart’ series; I can confidently say this was an absolute pleasure to read. It contains a wealth of knowledge in a relatively small number of pages and provides some great examples from real (live) businesses. In addition to the bits I’ve posted above, I also learned more about the decision-making process in humans and how emotion is the ‘tie-breaker’ in many scenarios. As stated in other books such as “The Paradox of Choice,” humans are inundated with decisions on a daily basis. Many of these decisions end up being decided by emotion.
Walter describes this process as “the gridlock of logic” with emotion having the “tie-breaking vote.” Not only is this objectively true, but I found myself relating to it on a personal basis: choosing this book (over countless others) was itself an emotionally-driven decision: I found the purple color on the cover to be different/distinct and calming. In other words, simply designing for emotion can give you the edge over a plethora of other options (ex. aesthetic usability effect).
I absolutely loved this book and will definitely be checking out more from this series in the very near future. There are countless other lessons from this book that have already proved helpful!
