Learning To Love Humans—Emotional Interface Design
November 2nd, 2010 by Matt Haff
Aarron Walter, author, Building Findable Websites
Humans, though cute and cuddly, are not without their flaws, which makes it a challenge to design for them. By understanding how the wet, mushy processor works in these hairy little devils, you can design interfaces and web experiences that will have them hopelessly devoted to your brand. Aarron will introduce you to the emotional usability principle—a design axiom that identifies a strong connection between human emotion and perceived usability. Through real-world examples, you’ll learn practical interface design techniques that will make your sites and applications more engaging to the humans they serve.
Change
Humans need this stuff - physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualization.
We are going from being private to very public about who we are. Social Media is what changed all of this…
What’s our relationship to computers?
Humans need this stuff - functional, reliable, usable, pleasurable
Usable = edible… it’s not hard to make stuff that is usable, that would be like a chef working to make something edible.
Pleasurable = make something boring pleasurable by adding a personality…a platform for emotion.
Contrast = cost/benefit helps people to determine if something is good for me or bad for me.
Emotion = people will forgive your shortcomings, follow your lead, and sing your praises if you reward them with positive emotion.
Personality = invites empathy. Check out Feathers-tweets, by giving a personality to an app you can create a progressively enhanced user experience. At the same time it’s imperative to know that before your application can create an emotional relationship with the user it must get the basics right.
Treats = layering treats throughout an interface can make it even more fun. It cannot come at the expense of the usability of your product/site.
Conditioning = get people used to your personality and you can train them to have a specific kind of condition.
Discovery = having little fun stuff throughout the site (Mailchimp login screens, stretch monkey arm)
Forgiveness = If something is wrong, give them back something that shows that you care.
Limits = Attention is finite… don’t add a billion things to the home page, it needs to be really direct and easy to understand what you should be doing on the site. People aren’t lazy, they are looking for the path of least resistance.
Bribery = If it’s tricky then bribe them into becoming invested… Dropbox, you get 250MB FREE for doing a few tasks
Risk = party poopers… sometimes people don’t want the extras, you can bypass this by being honest about who you are and not changing in order to make everyone happy.
