Designing for the user’s emotional journey
A valuable tool to help guide design decisions while building thoughtful products.
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An emotional journey is the visualization of a user’s emotional experience when interacting with a product or service.
People go through a range of conscious and subconscious emotional reactions when interacting with products. An experience becomes truly valuable to us when it hits the right notes at the right time. That is when an experience truly feels human. In other words, our reaction to things is heavily dependent on how we feel at that particular moment. Products and services that consider this are able to truly create an enriching, connected experience. Therefore, in the design process, it is important not only to consider the ‘what’, but also the ‘when’, in order to create a powerful experience. The key to this is figuring out the ‘design timing’. Let’s take a look at a few examples that illustrate this concept.
Lyft bikes and scooters
A good example of design timing done right. Traditionally we see flows beginning with onboarding screens. In this case, the onboarding flow is triggered as the scooter is unlocking after being scanned. This does two very important things.
- By providing contextual information right before the action, the app feels more intuitive and helpful.
- The well-timed onboarding flow during the unlocking stage makes an otherwise dull moment refreshing and enjoyable.
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Robinhood
Let’s take a look at the cryptocurrency buying experience in Robinhood. For the first time buyer, this process could be very exciting yet intimidating. The app uses a progressive flow that does a great job of informing and engaging the user. Here’s how it really taps into the emotional experience to build a really successful solution.
- At a moment when the user is both anxious and excited, the clear communication paired with simple, joyful interactions helps mitigate emotional lows while leveraging the highs to deliver a powerful experience.
- The animated success screen is a joy to experience and a perfect crescendo after all that build up and anticipation.
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Once we identify the key moments in the user’s emotional experience, we can craft intuitive moments which respond to their emotional highs and lows.
In a recent team project with a client, we applied this practice to our design process and noticed remarkable results. The task was to design a concept for a navigational app for hospital visitors. This was an extremely challenging problem to solve considering how emotionally complex hospitals can be for the users/visitors.
During the user research phase, we visualized the hospital visitor’s emotional journey on a graph. This acted as a guideline for the design decisions we would be making for this project.
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By mapping this out we broke down the app into 2 key phases.
Phase 1: The visitors seem very anxious at this stage when they are new to the hospital environment. This is when the app should help build confidence through reinforcement and contextual communication. This guided experience would mitigate the anxiety and make users feel more comfortable and aware.
Phase 2: As the users begin to feel more comfortable in the space they begin to feel more relaxed and seek more control. This phase allows users to dictate the experience by giving them the freedom to explore or simply disengage.
By designing based on the emotional journey of the visitor, we were able to create a strong user-centered solution that was sensitive to the user’s emotional experience through their journey.
Closing thoughts🤷♂️
Since several factors beyond just the user and the device dictate an experience. As designers, it is our responsibility to be sensitive to these external factors when designing. A clear understanding of the user’s emotional journey is a great tool to help us achieve that. Successfully harnessing this would lead to creating a powerful and empathetic solution.
Recommended reads: Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Don Norman