Emotion in design

Harnessing emotion is essential for a successful design, regardless of the market, the company or the person. If you can't connect with your target audience, there is no chance of reaching your clientele, making a sale, promoting a brand, attracting a new customer, or making an impact. That is the key, link your ideas with the person on the other side, impact their life and make them think.

Good designers, in any market and at any level, will always think about invoking emotions in their consumer base. In today's technology-saturated society, it is often forgotten or misused. Emotion must be at the top of each business, creating an identity. The best designs, logos, brands, advertisements, programs and applications achieve their emotional connection with their consumers by adducing certain feelings.

In the case of insurance companies, your task is to focus on friendliness, trust, accessibility and optimism with the client. For technology companies, their strategy focuses on portability, usability, interface and longevity of the product. In the example of sports brands, their focus is on the energy, power and determination that go hand in hand with sports fans and players. In many cases, when the design ignores how your target audience feels, the target audience will ignore the product. Excitement borders great design; as a carrier, courier and strategy.

The Landscape of Using Emotion in Website Design

Emotional design has become a powerful tool for creating exceptional user experiences for websites. However, emotions used to not play such an important role on the Web. Actually, they didn't usually play any role at all; rather, they were drowned out by a flood of rational functionality and efficiency.

We were so busy trying to adapt to the World Wide Web as a new medium that we lost sight of its full potential. Rather than use the Internet on our terms, we adapt to its technical and, initially, impersonal nature. If it weren't for visionary contemporaries like Don Norman or Aarron Walter, we might still be focusing on improving processes, neglecting the potential of emotional design. Attractive products activate our creativity and ultimately broaden our mental processes, making us more tolerant of minor difficulties. Attractive products make troubleshooting easy, making them absolutely essential.

User experience designer Aarron Walter contributed a great book to this new era of design: Designing for Emotion. In this book, he defines emotions as the "lingua franca of humanity", the native language with which every human being is born. He describes how important emotional experiences are because they leave a deep imprint on our long-term memory and create "an experience for users that makes them feel that there is a person, not a machine, at the other end of the connection."

Good design foundation

A couple of things form the basis of any good design, whether the design is emotional or not. Why are we talking about the basis of a design here? Think of building a house. First, you need a solid foundation; then you can start planning the division of the space and building walls. The same thing happens in web design; You need to know your internal design goals, who your users are, and in what context they will use your website. After this preliminary work is done, you can start with the design.

Internal design goals

Before starting anything, ask yourself what your own goals are. This does not mean that you should put yourself in the spotlight during the rest of the process, but it is important to know what image you want to communicate, what your values ​​and visions are, and how you want others to see you. With this knowledge in hand, he is armed to be very clear and consistent not only in his actions, but also in his appearance. A certain amount of continuity and predictability adds to your trustworthiness, which is important in getting people to commit to a relationship with you.

Potential Users

Know who you are designing for. Your future users will be the people who buy and use your product or website, so make sure you know what they want. General demographics will give you a rough idea of ​​who you're targeting. By drawing a clear picture of your goals, how they are going to use your website, and what they care about and what they don't care about, you will learn how to target your users. Without knowing your potential users, designing something relevant that is usable and enjoyable will be quite difficult.