Emotions are important in design because they are a powerful motivator and can influence perception, cognition, attention, decision-making, learning, memory, social interaction, health and well-being, experience, behavior, and aid in managing information overload. Designers who learn how to assess, evoke and predict the emotional status and response of a user, can better present information in a way that aids in understanding and retaining information and communicate more effectively. They can create a better customer experience.
A partial list of design elements that can evoke an emotional response through sensory stimuli include: color, pattern and repetition, space, proportion, typography, sound, animation, motion, signs, symbols and images. In addition, designers can evoke emotions through interface design principles including, but not limited to, clear navigation, feedback, error prevention and recovery, scale and contrast, craftsmanship, structure and organization, and consistency.
Being able to assess your users’ emotional state is important. User’s who are stressed have problems memorizing and often experience tunnel vision. Repeated strikes of emotion cause it’s perceived intensity to increase. An angry customer can become furious with a couple of bad experiences. Customer experience is the number one differentiator. Companies that can provide a great experience will have loyal customers and gain trust.
Repeated strikes of emotion cause it’s perceived intensity to increase.
Other methods of evoking an emotional response include meeting expectations, allowing for play, and storytelling. In order to assess and predict the emotional response of users to a product interface or service, designers need to do research and testing to understand the environment and emotional needs of the user. They need to understand the stakeholders, ecosystem, customer journey touchpoints, and solicit domain expertise.
For example, customers using services for homelessness, foster care, school 504 disability services, veteran healthcare, etc. could have feelings of tunnel vision and stress due to their immediate situation or past experiences. Being able to navigate the services and information will depend on how well it is designed with an understanding of their emotions.
There are a variety of methods for measuring emotional response including, but not limited to, participatory design, questionnaires, experience diaries and body response measurements. Design research is needed because the way a stimulus is sensed is sometimes modified by needs, personality, experience, beliefs and attitude. In addition, a designer should be aware of how a user’s cultural background can influence their emotional response to design elements.
Tammy Fritz has over 25 years experience in design. She is an independent contractor and Principal and Founder of Pink Frog Interactive, Inc. Tammy founded Pink Frog in 2005 where she specializes in human-centered design including human computer interface design, design research, customer experience design and service design. Tammy has a passion for combining human factors, design thinking and research, innovation and technology to help solve complex problems.
Tammy has a Masters of Design degree in Communication Planning and Information Design from Carnegie Mellon University. She did her thesis work and worked with the Human Computer Interaction Institute at CMU studying internationalization in design, way-finding in virtual environments and how to evoke, assess and predict affect in design. Tammy also has a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Pittsburgh and a certificate in Specialized Technology from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Her work has won design awards from Intel and AIGA and has been submitted for patents.
Tammy follows a user-centered design process and uses principles and techniques derived from cognitive science, psychology and anthropology to partner with her clients and design and test services, product interfaces and interactions in order to make them efficient, useful, usable and desirable.
At Pink Frog, Tammy has interviewed hundreds of our clients customers across the globe in multiple languages to find out what constitutes an exceptional customer experience, define the customer journey and provide actionable insight for a company roadmap.
Tammy has shadowed nurse practitioners in the field and interviewed users in Jacksonville Mississippi to help redesign applications to order medical supplies. She has redesigned medical insurance websites and designed medical benefit communications to employees. Some of Tammy’s clients have included TE Connectivity, First Insight, Developmental Dimensions International (DDI), and Genco (now FedEx). Tammy has also done design work as a subcontractor for Highmark, McKesson, North Shore Long Island Jewish Center Cancer Institute, Rite Aid, CDC/NIOSH, Martris LLC, and Capital Blue.
Prior to founding Pink Frog, Tammy worked at IT companies design software including NDCHealth and Freemarkets where she worked in multidisciplinary teams within large IT departments to brings the needs of the customer to the process. She has led large-scale ui design efforts in co-branding, branding, workflow, information architecture, and internationalization and worked on sites that were over 4000 prototype pages from the ground up. She has worked on mergers helping companies consolidate functionality of web applications into one seamless user experience and multiple internal applications into one consistent user experiences. She has worked on large scale pharmaceutical applications and has led ethnographic research projects. She has worked through all phases of the human-centered design process.
Tammy volunteers as a foster parent for the Humane Society, secretary for Pennsylvania Association Gifted Education, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and Epi-Life.
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