Emotional Design: Creating Memorable User Experiences

Emotional design involves creating products or services that produce positive emotions, improving user engagement. It is based on the idea that emotions influence how people perceive, use, and remember products or services. It equally believes that designing for emotion can improve user satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Presently, creating good working products is good, but a great user experience is necessary to make it outstanding and successful. Product Designers should aim at reaching their users at their cognitive levels (visceral, behavioral, and reflective), to give them a wholesome user experience.

The Three Levels of Emotional Design

According to Don Norman, three different levels of design capture how users emotionally react to products. These include Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective Emotional Designs. At the intersection of these three levels of Emotional Design is what is called ‘Delight’.

1. Visceral Emotional Design

This is the first reaction you get from using a product. It includes the color, sound, shape, beauty, look and feel, etc. It has the following benefits:

• It sets a positive foundation for every subsequent action(s)

• Users are more likely to forgive subsequent faults if they had a good first experience with the product.

• An initial attraction to the product will encourage positive socialization with the product.

2. Behavioral Emotional Design

This relates to how Users feel as they use the product. It includes the product performance, function, usability, and effectiveness. It also has the following benefits:

• Allows users to feel a sense of empowerment from usage

• Provides a direct relationship between a user’s actions and the expected value, thereby building trust.

• It encourages repetitive actions, as users' expectations are met from usage.

3. Reflective Emotional Design

This is the highest level of emotional design and describes the User’s experience after using the product. It also determines whether the User wants to experience the product again. Some benefits of the Reflective Emotional Design include:

• Users are encouraged to share their experiences with others

• Elicits a sense of pride and identity from using the product, which may not necessarily have to do with the product itself.

• Generally captures the meaning, impact, and experience of the product.

In practice, Emotional design aims to create products that combine these three levels to give users a satisfying and meaningful experience. When a product achieves this, it is considered desirable, and results in stronger brand loyalty.

What Is an Emotional Design Product?

An Emotional Design Product is bought for emotional reasons rather than functional reasons. To be an exceptional Designer, you need to understand not just how your Users react to your product, but why they react that way. Some examples of Emotional Products are:

1. Apple - the iPhone: Compared to a product like Nokia, it is clear which users would prefer.

2. Coca-Cola - sometimes lets users customize the cans and send them to their loved ones.

3. Lysol - relies on visual metaphor, positioning the product to appeal to mothers and their children.

4. Alpaka - it focuses on an urban and tactical style, using weather-resistant and modular designs that attract tech-oriented users.

5. Nike - uses a ‘hero-centered’ theme, that appeals to athletes and sportspersons.

Emotional Design also helps with product branding and marketing, since Users mostly make decisions based on emotions. It is therefore important to infuse beautiful and appealing product designs to trigger Users’ emotions and encourage purchase.

Before adopting Emotional Design strategies, your products must be Functional (beneficial to users), Reliable (meet Users’ expectations), and Easy to use. Generally, when a product focuses on human pain points, the brand connects with Users personally.

Some additional considerations include Empathy and Storytelling. Empathy helps Designers connect with the users, to create experiences that are specific and personal to them. Storytelling embeds narrative elements into the design and enhances the overall engagement.

How to Apply Emotional Design to Achieve Results

• Use powerful visual elements (3D designs, illustrations, colors, etc.). This arouses the emotions of Users.

• Interactive Design Components (GIFs, functional product packaging, etc.). This helps to keep your users engaged.

• Engage more personally with users, research your target audience, and strive to meet their product needs.

• Make use of humor and storytelling, to get users hooked and engaged.

• Showcase your brand identity. Use mascots, images, human faces, etc., to put a face to your brand logo.

• Focus on details, your message should be clear, and light-hearted and invoke happy feelings in the users.

• Introduce characters, sound effects, videos, etc., to encourage user engagement.

Characteristics of Emotional Designs

Designs should be more human-centered and be the basis for a Product designer's work. Generally, designs should incorporate:

1. Discoverability: the ability to easily discover what is to be done.

2. Feedback: a signal of what happened

3. Visual appeal

Emotional designs have some great benefits that have made them indispensable for product designers. They create curiosity, and satisfaction and even make a user feel successful. If a digital product gives us positive feelings, we overlook small issues, crucial for SaaS customer service.

Emotional designs should create a positive, memorable experience like a well-planned product launch communication plan.

Additional benefits include:

A Feeling of Achievement or Accomplishment

Tools like to-do apps help us manage tasks effectively and make us feel we have achieved a great feat, even with small updates. This is especially true for non-routine tasks, such as those identified using a feature prioritization matrix.

User Experience (UX) Design

Humans are naturally curious beings. Therefore any product that allows immediate interaction can create happy and curious feelings in users. Certain websites that let users interact with their products in new and different ways also create positive user experiences.

Leisure and Entertainment

Any brand that allows users to engage personally with them, from 404 pages to welcome emails, interactive boxes, help pages, etc., provides a sense of human touch. They entertain users, keeping them engaged and hooked, which can be as effective as utilizing product updates.

Emotional Design has to do with the influence of feelings that products provoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on expensive items like Gucci bags and Rolex watches, to the impact of emotion on the everyday objects of tomorrow.

Emotional design is unquestionably a smart component that forges any marketing campaign forward. Getting your target audience to go from visual to logical is already a big step. After that, you only need to give them a little nudge to seal the deal and make them buy. This is where powerful designs come into play.