Why emotional intelligence can make a difference for UX designers
Emotional Intelligence is knowing what we are feeling and why we are feeling, which is a basis of good intuition, good decision making, and moral compass.
What is the key range of abilities of Emotional intelligence?
- Self-awareness
The ability to monitor our emotions, thoughts from moment to moment is key to understanding ourselves better, being at peace and proactively managing our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. - Self-management
Handling and improving yourself in stress and organizing yourself whenever a certain situation is out of your control. - Self-regulation
It’s defined as knowing about yourself-in every situation, it also involves self-monitoring, goal setting, reflective thinking, decision making, planning, plan enactment, self-evaluation and management of emotions arising because of behavior change. - Self-learning
Convert yourself in positive emotions, when we are in crippling situations, and aligning our actions into a passion. - Empathy
It’s the understanding of what someone else is feeling or their opinions, it is about showing the gratitude “like of sharing the token of appreciation and walking in another person’s shoes, giving the time also best understanding for loved ones.”
Here are three traits that make a great designer:
Empathy
Intuition
Creativity
Empathy in UX design
“Empathy — the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another person — is one of the many ‘soft’ skills a great UX designer should possess. Empathizing with users leads to a genuine understanding of how to solve their problem and ultimately building better products.” — Paul Olyslager
To master the ability to empathize is essential in the design industry. It gives a deep understanding of end-users; it allows to create great, engaging products. But there’s one important thing we need to know:
We want to understand what our users’ feelings and intentions are, yes, but we really need to do so from their perspective. One person’s reaction to frustration or excitement might not be the same as the other would experience in a similar situation.
One of the best ways to wear someone else’s shoes is to sharpen our listening and observation skills. These skills allow for interpreting the difference between what people say and what they mean.
They are the key to all effective communication: when you listen effectively and try to understand what someone is really saying, there’s a much lower chance of misunderstanding it.
Intuition in UX design
It’s not related to a particular subject in a design school, it often associated with impulsive, irrational decisions, It also has been the subject of philosophical and psychological studies. But its definition varies depending on the discipline and the context. So, I would like to explore what intuition means for design.
Intuition is the ability to reach conclusions and decide without conscious reasoning. This is something every professional designer does daily. We know how to make social, conceptual, and aesthetic decisions based on our intuition. We know how to achieve goals, solve problems, and create effects. We know when something is right.
Intuitions result from the processes taking place in the brain. It is an automatic and subconscious process to reach a conclusion by making a comparison between the model created as a result of experiences and the experience witnessed at the moment.
Intuitions allow us to act and decide, even if we are dealing with unforeseen events with little knowledge. It plays a critical role in every aspect of life. In design decisions, intuitions are the accelerators and the most accurate ways to start the process. Trusting their intuitions and developing them is the career journey of the designers who find creative, fast and unique solutions.
Creativity in UX design
Process, outcomes, uniqueness are the essential ways to define creativity in UX design.
- Process
A good process helps you be creative. It takes care of details, helps you think things through, it helps you set your intention. Most creative UX people follow a process. - Outcomes
Although the process is important, the process alone is not enough. To claim creativity, there would need something at the end of the process. That is outcomes. - Uniqueness
The outcome you have at the end of the process has to be unique and be of some value to someone, it matters how uniquely you can convert your idea into the best design solution.
How Emotional Intelligence can help UX designers to connect with the target User?
We need to focus on we are designing for human; we are designing for the overall experience and to connect with the users. We should consider who is our target users are and how they will feel and react using the product.
“Whitney Hess, a UX Coach, stated on one of her talks that UX is the never-ending process of seeing the world from the customers’ perspectives and working to improve the quality of their lives. We understand that we are not designing for ourselves but for our users.”
Emotions also help us build stronger relationships with people, and positive emotions remain with us for a long time. Many designers emphasize the hidden value of creating an enjoyable and memorable UIs for customers. It is a sure way to make users feel it values them and give organizations the opportunity to connect with them on a more personal level. Apart from usability and technical competency, UX designers should attempt to understand the real impact their products have on the user’s feelings.
Our applications and/or websites don’t have to be like it has everything or complicated to attract more users. Just because something looks beautiful in our perspective, it doesn’t mean it is already usable for the users. Sometimes, a very simple design wins the heart of the users because of its usability. Like Google’s search engine, for example, who would have known that a simple text box with two buttons would be that big.
Integrating Emotional Intelligence to UX Design
These psychological factors can induce positive emotions:
- Positivity
- Surprise
- Uniqueness
- Attention
- Attraction
- Anticipation
- Exclusivity
- Responsiveness
