Emotional design strives to create products that elicit appropriate emotions, in order to create a positive experience for the user. To do so, designers consider the connections that can form between users and the objects they use, and the emotions that can arise from them. The emotions a product elicits can strongly influence users’ perceptions of it.
Emotional design is a big buzz word within the UX community. Designs which tap into the user’s emotions are considered to do more than just respond to their stated needs and provide a greater level of user experience. One way of understanding emotions is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions – this may help you deliver better experiences to your users when designing products.
Products that people love are products that people use over and over again. Products that they like, on the other hand, quickly slip from the user’s mind and are replaced in time with products that are liked better or even loved. The corner stone of emotional design is the idea that if you can elicit strong emotions in your users – you can use those emotions to either create loyalty or to drive a customer to take action.
Robert Plutchik, was a thought leader in the study of emotions. Before he passed away in 2006 he was responsible for 8 books (and editing another 7), nearly 300 articles, and 45 chapters in emotional research as a psychologist. He held a doctorate degree as well as two positions at respect universities at professorial level.
Plutchik’s Psycho-evolutionary Theory of Emotion
Robert Plutchik devised the psycho-evolutionary theory of emotion and this helps categorize emotions into primary emotions and the responses to them. He argued that the primary emotions are an evolutionary development and that the response to each such emotion is the one that is likely to deliver the highest level of survival possibility.
He posited 10 points with regard to emotion:
Emotions are found at all evolutionary levels of species. They are equally applicable to all animals as they are to human beings.
Emotions evolved differently in different species and may be expressed differently between those species.
The purpose of emotions is an evolutionary survival response enabling the organism to survive when confronted by environmental challenges.
While emotions can be displayed and evoked through different mechanisms in different organisms there are common elements to emotions that can be identified across all emotional animals.
There are 8 basic, primary emotions.
Other emotions are simply a combination of these 8 basic emotions or are derived from one (or more) of these basic emotions.
Primary emotions are “idealized” and their properties must be inferred from evidence but cannot be accurately stated in full.
Each primary emotion is paired with another and is a polar opposite of that pair.
Emotions can and do vary in degrees of similarity to each other.
Emotions exist in varying degrees of intensity.
