Creating Emotional Connections |UX Design Study

For the most part, emotions are sensations, feelings, and physiological states that are not under our control. We experience emotion as a direct and immediate result of our involvement and interaction with the world.

The human capacity for emotion informs, directs, and, to a large extent, determines our experience of the world, how we navigate it, and our relations with the things — both animate and inanimate — within it.

Designers are essentially striving to develop products that encourage the user to form these emotional connections and associations. From the materials, colors, textures, and other aesthetic qualities of a product to the adverts used to attract customers, attempts are being made to make people feel. Designers are not, on the whole, making their products a certain color because it is their own personal favorite or it matches the color of their eyes; it is a conscious decision based on human psychology.

General emotional factors include:

• Human cognition: The way we think, learn, solve problems, make decisions, and simply consume information.
• Human psychology: We are developing an ever-growing understanding of how things affect our emotions, including colors, sounds, music, shapes, people, faces, and a whole range of other elements. For the most part, human psychology is similar across most of the world’s population, so designers can usually be pretty confident that their products will induce a similar emotional response from one person to another.
• Culture: This could fall into the ‘specific’ consideration category, but releasing a product to a large potential user base involves generalization. Within each household, there are probably aspects that you might think represent a culture-specific to that group of people, but designers would find it impossible to contend with all of these individual ‘micro-cultures’. Therefore, designers must research and develop products according to the dominant culture, whilst remaining as sensitive to the specific ‘micro-cultures’ as possible in the final product.

Specific emotional factors include:

• Psychological and physical user base qualities: for example is someone has developed a product for disabled people, a designer must have an understanding of how this condition impedes mobility and flexibility. If the product demands that the user has to have grip while holding the product, or some visual manual before they use it. If not done right, it can create frustration, sadness and the product will probably sink without trace.
• Dispositional factors: These refer to how the user is likely to feel at the time of using a particular product. For example, someone using a touchscreen train ticket machine will probably be in a hurry. The design of the machine and its interface needs to reflect the users’ desire for speed, ease of use, and clear instructions to help them through the process.
• Situational factors: Where will the product be used? How will the product fit into the user’s life? Does the product work in combination or next to other things found in the user’s work set-up? If your product will be used in an area with restricted space, making it large, cumbersome or an odd shape will probably infuriate the users and impede their productivity (this also applies to screen space, not just physical space!).