Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Norman explains “How important emotions is to everyday’s life”.
Are there people without emotions? No, we are completely engaged with joy and excitement, anxiety and anger, fear and rage and without these our life would be incomplete.
From a coffee we drink to artifacts we use, the customer enjoys to consume if they are emotionally attached. An intuitive emotion is created on everything we use or consume, which causes positive emotions towards the product. Recently the emotional design has become an essential factor in web designing to make the customers more engaged on the websites.
We stop keeping a tab on time spent and completely engage ourselves only when we are emotionally attached. This could be well understood by the gamer’s who spend most of the time without being consciously engaged with the product as such .
How the designers are going to achieve this? As each user has different emotions toward things (the thing which is pleasant for one person may not be pleasant to another), the designer has to handle emotions in a more appropriate way.
I understood this with an everyday example of virtual reality. Facebook. And how the designers initially connected and still manage to hold billions of people emotionally attached on a single platform.
Now, how many of us really thought that our personal lives are becoming public? How many of us thought that our victories, tragedies, trite moments of life or be to more precise we are sharing our emotions to the world?
We are sharing, but how comfortable are we really to share these emotions face-face or in the online world? This thought to know about the sharing behavior of others initiated by noticing the sharing patterns on social networks.
To make it more concrete, I interviewed few people. The interview wasn’t conducted with an intention to think about my sharing pattern, but all my participants have started to think about the information they are sharing. According to them, the major reason for joining a social network is to get connected with friends.
People stated initially they were more conscious about the things they share on social networks, later the first thing most of the people have done was updated their status about the triumphs and then with the photos. The people now felt that they are completely considering social networks as a person who is available 24/7. Among the participants, some people have an account on social networks where they are connected to no one but just update status related to their moods.
Does the social networks a good companion? Yes, people are emotionally attached to these networks and it engages their users. The fastest growth of the social networks lies in the emotional design. To make it simpler the use of phrases – “My Account”, “Whats on your mind?”, “Photos of you”, “Share with your friends” gives the users an intuitive emotion to get attached. The positive emotions will always produce a trust on your product as they share all emotions on the social networks. Know your user, Hear from them and Design for them. – Saranya S, UX Designer.
Source : https://experiencedesignideas.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/emotional-design-people-involvement/