Do you understand your mood throughout the day? “ Maybe or Unsure” is always a common answer. People are hardly recognize their own emotions, but nowadays our technology has been developed to recognize emotions and emotions began to become a major role in UX design process.
What is emotion? According to the definition of emotion on Wiki: “ Emotion is a mental state associated with the nervous system[1][2][3] brought on by chemical changes variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure.[4][5 “ Emotion is very abstract and hard to measure, even people hardly recognize their own emotions. So why does emotions still matter in the UX design process?
Emotions help UX designer to discover User’ Need
IT HELPS EXPLAIN CERTAIN BEHAVIORS
In terms of discussing the users research, emotion is represented as a kind of users’ behaviors. It helps us to understand what’s the experiences under a certain emotion. For example, if a user feel angry, we may discover what’s the experiences make him/her angry.
IT IDENTIFIES THE DESIGN OPPORTUNITIES
Therefore, we can defines the design opportunities through user’ emotion. If users feel angry, we can continue to discover what the reasons makes users angry and how can we resolve them.
IT MAY BE ABLE TO PREDICT POINTS OF DROP-OFF
Another benefit that UX designers can utilize users’ emotion to improve their design. We can use emotion to predict the points of drop off. For example, users may feel inpatient and drop off the website and the UX designers should focus on the area which is caused this feeling.
EMOTION BECOME UX DESIGN STRATEGY
In addition, we not only use emotion to understand user’ need, but also use them to form the UX design strategy. In the below chart, you can see a product doesn’t exist only for a useful, reliable, and functional purpose and it can add more value on it: Give users a pleasure experiences. The important thing that every UX designer should ask themselves: What’s the experiences that UX designers want to deliver to users.
Measuring emotion methodology
There are two ways to discover user’ emotions: Non-verbal and Verbal. Non-verbal methodology is such as voice, facial expressions, or postural that represent the emotion. Another way to understand emotion is Verbal, users are using the rating scale to report their emotion during users interview.
How Emotion Become a digital product
We can also utilize emotion to create a digital product such as a good example of facial recognition. The image shows a Face AI exhibition in Cooper Hewitt Museum. It features on using AI in the facial recognition to track users current emotion. I believe emotional design product will become more popular in the future and it will understand user’ emotion more accuracy in order to deliver the most personalized experiences for them.
Reference
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313757692_Measuring_emotio
https://www.toptal.com/designers/product-design/design-for-emotion-toincrease-
https://medium.com/@kesatuuli/want-to-write-a-kick-ass-user-journeystart-
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/events/current-exhibitions/face-values/