Why Do Users Experience Negative Emotions?
Three factors why a user can have a negative experience and how to avoid it.
When designing a product, a lot of design and developers swear to make an enjoyable as well as pleasant user experience. To achieve such experience, it’s now a well known secret to shift paradigm to be more user-centered, and apply psychology or human behavior theory. However, one of the most potential yet left out part of psychology that might be useful for designing user experience is understanding human emotions.
Human emotions has long known as a factor that influence a person decision making process, but certain emotions might be stronger than the other. Negative emotions especially, could overpower positive ones that come from positive experiences, hence it’s important to recognize them so product designers, could anticipate and find a work around.
Negative emotions come from having to deal with stress. In a product context, this stress occurs when users face a functions that hindered them from achieving their goals.
In Gordon Allport’s Big Five Personality theory, negative emotions might be caused by one or more negative factors. There are 3 factors that affect our emotions negatively, which are Worry, Intensity, and Interpretation. To get better understanding on this concept, I will borrow the theory and apply the three factors to analyze several actual cases that happened.
1. Worry
Some people worry about whether they or those important to them will served in theirs best interests. Things that make them nervous, particularly when the outcomes are doubtful, are like bad news. Users hate uncertainty so much, so when things get unpredictable and show any indication that would create loss for them, they would choose to abandon the ship immediately. Joining a situation when things are cloudy and lacking security is not an option for many.
Example: When you shop in e-commerce B, you would get penalized for IDR 10.000 for any kind of cancellation –yes, for any kind of reasoning as well. There is also this voucher scheme from e-commerce EL that would invalidate users hard-earned discount vouchers if the seller choose to not fulfill the user’s order. Yep, you read that right: users effort to do daily login in order to get the discounts voucher could be wasted because of a one-sided a decision (order cancellation) made by other party (the seller).
These kind of possibilities actually trigger the worry factor for users. The extra fee for cancellation that shows no room for any reason and losing voucher due to one-sided cancellation are possible loss that make users have to think twice before continuing their transaction. Even worse, users could become severely averse to the e-commerce services if they already have bought things from said e-commerce and experienced bearing the one-sided loses first hand.
2. Intensity
People get heated in the middle of conflict or disagreement or when mistreated. Their intensity while confronting the conflict head first could serve as an indicator for justice and fair play, and tend to be unflappable. A conflict, a lot of times, are handled poorly with vague communications and obscure policy to begin with. These kind of mishaps tend to escalate the intensity and make sellers in a worse situation. Anticipate the conflicts by setting a clear communication to the users, for either pricing or policy.
Examples: e-commerce A who recently give out major discounts in their site but later call off plenty amount of orders made in that promotion period. e-commerce A declared those orders were cancelled due to mistakes in pricing, a reason that sounded ridiculous since the one who set them were the e-commerce themselves. This sudden cancellation with its fishy reasoning are unjust and made users feel betrayed.
As for another example, we have e-commerce C who will roll out hidden fees by the time users almost done with check out. In these cases mentioned above, users trust would decline aggressively since they believe the seller side (e-commerce) has caused them loss without notice.
3. Interpretation
Past experience with a product shaped users interpretations on the interaction between them. They do not just appraise the product, but they also evaluate their abilities while using them. It’s important to remember that while users are people and people tend to take blame for their own failure and frequently experienced feeling of self-doubt. With this tendency, it’s very possible for users to have a negative interpretation that they are not good enough to use the product once they find themselves keep making mistakes while using one. The pessimistic point of view on themselves could crease tenfold if the mistakes they made cause them physical loss (such as failing to order the right item and forgetting the right unique code for payment.)
Examples: A prefilled function in top up section at e-commerce T perhaps made with good intentions to speed up process to check out, however this function have caused loss for users who often purchase top up for their colleague and family. When being applied without an extra caution for users, a prefilled number function might push users to buy items for the wrong destination number. This is very harmful since it is a mistake that cost users real money, yet would be very hard to trace because the system still counted them as a success transaction. While traumatize is a strong word, I do find users who have these experience tend to shy away from using the same product and opt for doing top-up with other e-commerce. Even when e-commerce T is pulling out huge discounts for top up transactions, a pessimistic point of view would drive users to purchase top up through other services –where they believe they could make less mistakes.
Negative emotions that come from these three factors could be anticipated by:
- Simplify the process — Steve Kruger’s word never goes out of style:
Don’t make users think!
2. Be transparent to your users.
3. Be consistent — knows that your users like certain functions or part on the product? Dig the reasons and replicate them throughout the flow so your users feel confident while using your product.
4. Lessened the damage — sometimes you tried your best but you still can’t keep everything open in the first glance; it’s okay, just make sure what you keep hidden is not that surprising.
5. Give them alternative — again, if you cant be 100% transparent from the beginning, always make sure users could their get B plan out.
There you go, my takes on negative emotions and how e-commerce could take some learning from their past interactions. Every experiences mentioned here are real and compiled for months from various people and communities. Interested in learning some of the experiences mentioned above (perhaps few of them come too close to your product) or just want to talk about UX with me? Feel free to reach out, I don’t bite ;)
Thank You!
