Come here, let’s give you a hug – it’s Emotional Design time

As soon as we say Emotional Design, you begin to picture crying artists angrily throwing paint at a canvas. Don’t you? But don’t worry, that’s not what this post is about. In fact, it’s going to get all sciencey, and explain how emotional design will improve your website. 

A little bit of background to get us in the mood

One mistake we see over and over again in the online world is designers and developers regressing to old notions of what the internet is for.  Since the very first developers created html, they’ve  been constantly experimenting to see what they could achieve with this amazing new technology.

Sadly, creative design wasn’t really considered, and neither were the end users.  After all, the only people using websites at the very beginning were other web developers.   It was all a bit of a geeky peeing contest to see who could send and receive data the fastest, and make the coolest stuff happen, and of course it eventually gave rise to the ubiquitous web that we know and love today.  As popularity grew, people outside of the developer caves began studying best practices, and general rules evolved around things that everyone used, like navigation and link styles.

But now, things are different. The web is where we do everything, and everyone is using it. People who have never even heard of html, or maybe don’t even use a computer, are using the web in many of their day-to-day processes like grocery shopping, banking and socialising. So instead of creating websites that speak to other websites, or websites that speak to people who know things about websites, we need to start creating websites that speak to real live, everyday people.

So, what’s the best emotional state for your customer to be in?

The answer is probably obvious, it’s happy.  From a psychological standpoint, happy people are able to focus better, they are more forgiving of little faults, they’re more interested in conversing, and they’re more likely to successfully complete tasks.  Happy people make amazing customers.

So, before we start considering how the technicalities of a transaction will work, and in fact before we even think  about how to sell to people, we need to work out how to make them happy first, and the rest will follow. 

How can we use this in web design to generate more business?

When creating a new website, or improving an existing website, our first goal should be to find places where we can improve the happiness levels of our users.

Put yourself into your customers’ shoes; are they coming to you because something has gone wrong? or do they need you to help them relax? What is their basic need from you as a person, underlying what you can offer them as a business?  Understanding how you are connecting with your users on a personal level is the foundation of what we call Emotional Design, and it’s at the foundation of today’s successful websites.

Top tips and techniques to find the emotional connection in your website

1) Create (and use) a Journey Map

Consider the entire journey that your customer will take from start to finish, and pinpoint the emotion at each stage. Highlight the highs and lows. 

Now analyse your Journey Map. If there’s an area of negative emotion, we can pre-empt it and make it a more positive experience for the user, perhaps by using more personal language, less robotic processes, or more creative visuals.   

For example, if a user needs to make a payment, help them to feel better about parting with their cash by replacing the cold  “Make a payment” prompt with the more sympathetic “Let’s get the payment out of the way so you can get started on the fun part”. It may seem trite, but humans are pretty simple, and we take emotional cues that easily.  The rest of the tips below provide more specifics for removing or reducing painful points in your user journey.

2) Understand what your audience wants to feel

Imagine a beauty salon website.  From a purely transactional perspective, the website should enable visitors to find prices and book appointments, and perhaps in the old days, that’s all the developer cared about.  But emotionally, the users (mostly women) want to feel gorgeous and glamorous, they want to de-stress and feel pampered, they want some ‘me-time’.  They don’t want to be hit with 500 special offers, 18 blog posts and 15 pictures of staff at the christmas party.

A calm but beautiful page design invites the user to relax, invokes the sense of beauty users need, and helps them to book that appointment in just a few clicks, and then “ahhhhh…that was so easy!” Happy Customer.  Find the emotion that underlies your customers’ needs and wants, and let that inform your design, regardless of your own personal tastes.

3) Clear the mind

The human mind is built to look for patterns. If it doesn’t find patterns, it tries to create them, and we experience this as confusion and distraction.  Imagine yourself back in the hunter-gatherer days. If we saw one delicious animal in an open field, it’d be easy to focus on what we want. However, if we’re in a jungle full of hundreds of yummy animals plus icky insects that might be poisonous, and swaying trees that might be hiding sabre-tooth tigers, our brains go into overdrive.  

We try to find patterns that let us more efficiently see the whole jungle at once, sorting out dinner from danger fast enough to react when we need to. This provides extra stress and strain on our minds, stopping us from focusing properly, and putting us into a generally negative space. In website design (I’m pulling back to my point here!), if you only put the most important items on any given page, it’s calmer, easier to comprehend and more successful than one page that tries to show everything your business does for all people at all times. 

For example:

4) Use distraction at low points

So, we know that humans are easily distracted (it comes from keeping an eye out for those sabre-tooth tigers in point 3).  If we know where there are emotional low points in our user journey, we can change the focus to distract our users at those times. Make a feature into a game, provide a joke or offer some help where you can.  It will throw them off their bad vibes and make them feel personally understood.   A great example of distraction (combined with the gift-giving hint below), is to offer a free report or discount code in exchange for an email address.  What you’re really trying to do is get more people to sign up to your mailing list, but what your user focuses on is the reward they get for doing so.

5) Gifts

Everyone loves something for free; it instantly lifts your mood. On your website, offer gifts to make your customers feel good about you.  These don’t have to be  physical gifts; it could be a discount code, a piece of good advice, or even a little character on the screen giving away digital hugs. Either way, making people feel appreciated is a great way to secure a stronger, happier connection. You could send an email to your audience just before one of the major holidays offering last minute hints for choosing a gift, and promising to deliver it to their recipient on time, so that you’re actually helping them out by making the sale, and they leave your site with a huge weight off their mind.

6) Games and interactions

This may seem far-fetched when trying to get across the idea to your CEO, but we’re all naturally competitive creatures, and we’re all easily distracted by perceived challenges. We can work this concept to our favour in our websites by gamifying processes that users may otherwise feel less than excited about.  We see this all the time when filling out forms, and we find ourselves feeling quietly satisfied as we move further and further along the progress bar.  Take this to another level by giving rewards or points for successfully completing sections when you’re collecting a lot of data, it’s a great way to provide a fun twist on a usually tedious process.

7) Dealing with skeptics and building trust

Trust is a gut feeling, not a rational process. Writing ‘we’re trustworthy’ on your website doesn’t make easier for anyone to trust you. Visual design, however, affects emotions in a very powerful way, more than any other stimulus. In the same way that you make snap judgments on the people you pass in the street, you judge websites the moment you encounter them. Selecting colours, style, tone of voice and interactions that are appropriate for your audience, and making sure that everything works well and is up to date, tells your audience (or tells their guts really) that you are legit and can be trusted. 

If you’re doing things that require big trust, like online financial transactions for example, use the right cues to show the skeptics that you’ve got this.  With money, it’s the padlock security symbol and the ‘https’ that people look for, and when you want an email address out of someone, promise upfront that you won’t be selling it on or spamming them.

8) Forgiveness

Ask for forgiveness when things go wrong. For example, when a page can’t be found (the dreaded 404 message), it has a negative effect on a user’s mood and makes them a tiny bit more annoyed. So this would be a great point to show some real humanity by asking for forgiveness. Provide a lighthearted 404 Error page to lighten the mood, whilst making it easier to understand the problem and what they can do about it.  This makes users feel that you respect them, gives you a human side, which is infinitely more forgivable than a corporation or a computer, and makes them more likely to continue. Check out Captovate’s 404 error page here, or google it to find loads of other cute or funny pages.  

9) Evolve Constantly

By this we don’t mean you should get all inconsistent with your customers (that would be annoying), but nothing lasts forever, not even good web designs.  Even the coolest new feature or edgiest new design needs to be tweaked over time to keep it relevant, fun and engaging to an evolving audience.

Wow, that’s a lot of feelings…

So what do we do with all this newfound emotional intelligence? It might seem huge here, but all of these pointers are part of a philosophy that can be gently and gradually worked in to your existing web presence.

It’s important to work this way of thinking into your planning processes and harness emotional design going forward, but you can also start incorporating it into your web content, your blog posts, your social media and more right now. From a customer’s perspective, feeling good about things is just as important as having a website that functions properly and follows a branding guide, if not more so. If you want to take your website to the next level without spending thousands, all it needs is a bit of understanding and human compassion.

P.s If you read this blog post all of the way to the end, you rock!! And we love you!