Infuse Emotion Into Experience Design October 31, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Design solutions, Online strategy.Tags: Emotional Experience Design
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The Web is becoming an increasingly important channel for companies, yet online experiences leave a lot to be desired. Our research shows that most sites have poor usability and they don’t reinforce key brand attributes. That’s why I worked with Ron Rogowski (the primary author) on a research report that created a concept called Emotional Experience Design, which we define as:
Creating interactions that engage users by catering to their emotional needs.
Emotional Experience Design is quite different from today’s functional design:
To apply Emotional Experience Design, firms must:
- Address customers’ real goals. People may come to a Web site to get service or buy a product, but that’s typically not the beginning or culmination of their journey. The mother of a newborn with stomach problems isn’t going to a site for information about medication; she’s looking for a way to bring comfort to her baby — and maybe get a little relief for herself. If firms want to engage customers, their sites must cater to these deeper customer needs..
- Develop a coherent personality. Web sites can feel sterile — devoid of a brand’s human characteristics, which are often apparent in other channels. But firms need their online experiences to do even more than just reinforce their brands; the experiences should enrich them. How? By developing a coherent, consistent personality that customers can easily recognize throughout all interactions.
- Engage a mix of senses. Over reliance on text and imagery makes many sites indistinguishable from competitors. Interestingly, most people can’t remember the content of Intel’s commercials, but they can easily imitate the Intel sound.While Web experiences don’t allow users to taste or smell objects, they can and absolutely should engage users’ senses of sight, hearing, and even touch.
The bottom line: It’s time to make emotional connections online.
The conclusions could be succinctly summed up by saying “accommodate your customers’ needs in their preferred method, time frame, and budget.” Absolutely true that emotional connections should be made online. Don’t neglect other connections (phone, personal visits, etc.).
Those connections, when they provide value to customers (whether online or not) form the basis for relationships. And those relationships form the basis for loyal customers.
http://pivotpointsolutions.net/
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Bruce
You will be aware we have been advocating and working in the space of Emotional design in our three books for a number of years. Therefore we can absolutely support this work. Emotions applies to the web as well as any other interaction with Customers.
Our last book “The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions drive value”, reveal the emotions that drive value for companies. This work was independently vetted by London Business School. Therefore I would suggest that people need to ask the question “What emotions are you trying to evoke”. Clearly ones that drive value would be beneficial. We know that 50% of an experiences is about emotion.
Finally, http://www.codebaby.com have a great phrase. “The web is an emotional flat place”. I think this is very true and they have experience in emotional connection on the web as well.
Bets regards
Colin Shaw
Founder, Beyond Philosophy
Andrew and Colin: Thanks for sharing your thoughts and links!
This is great. We need to move beyond the one-dimensional view of a user with singular needs to be fulfilled and consider human beings who, because of some contextual trigger, come to your product with values and desires, as well an (often ill-defined) goal. I’ve tried to illustrate this here – http://www.dancingmango.com/blog/2009/07/01/customer-value-proposition-model/
But that is only the start, the bigger challenge is to drag organisations out their silo’d thinking. The difficulty comes when each channel has independent targets. Rather than understanding a customer journey may start on the web, touch the call centre and convert in a store, they are all competing for the sale rather than working together to make it.
marc