Create Emotional Design using UI, UX, and CX
An emotion is an intense feeling that is short-term and is typically directed at a source. Emotions can often have indicative facial expressions and body language as well. When we talk to a person, emotions and related behaviors of that person directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in us.
Similarly, the emotions that a product generates can greatly impact the user's perception of the product. As a product designer, I often use the Emotion Design approach to activate a positive emotional response from the user.
The emotional design approach is a complete package and it has 3 levels.
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1. Visceral Design
Visceral design is a subconscious level of reaction when a user bumps into a product. The human brain registers an aesthetic impression on a product’s design within 17 to 50 milliseconds of exposure. Ohh wow, someone has a judgment on my design before the blink of an eye.
It says that when a user comes across our product, she takes 3 seconds to scan the entire design. (This scanning is being triggered by that subconscious reaction). The human brain tends to find shortcuts. So they don't read everything, they don't watch everything. Instead, they will scan. That’s why graphical illustrations, images, iconography, and other creative designs are crucial in visceral design.
UI or visual designers has to do some more smart work. Because, if we can capture a good first impression, then the users usually spend 30 or more seconds on the product to understand more about our product and its features. So there should be enough information on the functionality of the feature or service we provide. Make sure that the information is right and useful to avoid loss aversion and drop-off.
That’s why UI and visual design have a key role in product design. Those are the people who can create those million-dollar magic using color contrast, typography, and other creative weapons. The main challenge here is to create an interface with enough information and get that first impression without cluttering the UI. We should also be able to grab users' attention towards our main features with the lowest cognitive loads. A Master UI designer can do that job by using a visual hierarchy and beautifully crafted interaction design. Read my article about Interaction design and its 5 dimensions to get more understanding of this.
2. Behavioral Design
Once we successfully cater to the user needs in the first 3 seconds and then another 30 seconds as I mentioned above, they will usually spend another 3 minutes engaging with the product.
Behavioral design is associated with the usability of the product. How well the app functions, how intuitive the app and more. To achieve the best behavioral design, our app should have the supreme Functionality, Performance, and Physical feel. This is the phase of a user’s journey where the user builds a solid opinion about the product.
If we have a deep understanding of the user’s pain point and the business goals we are going to achieve, if we have defined the correct problems to be solved, if we have done the perfect ideation processes and found the solutions, if we have executed the design with well crafted visual designs- then we can achieve the best of behavioral design. This is a key area. Because, if we define the wrong problem in the initial stage, the best UX we created becomes a useless experience. Similarly, if we define the right problems and failed to solve them elegantly, we will fail to cater to the user’s expectations and thus lose trust. Doing the right UX processes and selecting effective methods is a must to make sure the app is really intuitive.
3. Reflective Design
This final level of emotional design refers to the positive impact that our product made on the user’s life. If the positive impact is immense and much valuable, they will come back again and likewise, we will earn trust. They will become happy and proud of the fact that they found this app very useful and that encourages users to share their experience with others.
Reflective design is the outcome of a good user experience design. But to make use of this outcome to get better business growth, we need to concentrate more on customer experience or CX design.
A CX designer’s main goal is to boost overall brand perception and increase customer loyalty; they are usually coming up with better ways to market, better ways to communicate with customers, and better ways to design enjoyable customer experiences overall. Customer experience professionals often look at how customers rate their overall experience with a company and analyze how many customers a company has gained or lost over a certain period of time. They measure customer satisfaction as well as customer loyalty.
Summary
By combining great UI, UX, and CX design, we can create a delightful emotional design. This will help any product gain users, use the product, and improve customer retention, thus massive product growth.
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