Emotional success: Designing and defining a user experience.
Usability Design – Pratt Institute School of Information
Blog post by Jamie Raymond
Creating a successful user experience involves developing digital products that are pleasing for the people using them. UX designers apply various UX techniques to digital products to provide the end user with a best overall impression. It is important to remember that humans are emotional and have different emotional responses to digital product, which may not always be noticeable. Putting a measurement on the way people feel after using a product and their emotional responses can a difficult task. In order to discover how people feel and the way they are expressing emotion a designer can perform analysis, utilize UX tools, and be sure to follow design principles, which elicit a good positive experience.
By performing an analysis prior to product or feature development a designer can make decisions based data. A trusted framework is Google’s HEART that was developed by Google to measure of the experience of large scale product and can work for smaller ones as as well. The HEART is a useful framework for UX designers because it can help measure product revenue and the user experience.
Other way UX designers use measure the success of a product or feature is utilizing UX “tools”. This can include performing user testing, usability testing, and analyzing analytics. Recent technology has let designers measure emotion by looking using facial analysis, eye tracking, and galvanic skin responses (GSR). While currently this technology has some flaws, it can provide interesting data on the way users are looking at screen, the way their body is responding, and emotions displayed on their face.
Don Norman’s 3 design principles of visceral, behavioral, and reflective design, provide users with a more pleasure experience with a product, which they are more likely to then use and reuse. In, Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things, Don Norman looks into how users perception of a product, how they interact with it, and post reflections.
The success of a digital product lies in the user experience, which can be defined in various ways. Keeping in mind humans are the end user, it then becomes important for the emotional impact of a product to be designed accordingly. A successful user experience will elicit positive emotions from the user, which can be analyzed a UX expert in various ways. By performing data analysis, utilizing tools, and following big picture design principles. UX design experts are able to look that these resources and develop a way to measure emotion in their users.
Resources:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/norman-s-three-levels-of-design
https://medium.com/@dhruvghulati/google-s-heart-framework-a-critical-evaluation-a6694421dae
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/donald-norman-s-three-levels-of-design
https://medium.com/uxinthe6ix/how-we-used-the-heart-framework-to-set-the-right-ux-goals-4454df39db94