Emotional Response

We are emotional creatures. We're not pure brain. Well, pure logic. But emotion drives so much of our lives. This is very clear in the technology world. You sometimes have images of like silicon wafers that really show the raw technology. Or one of those images of the blue light shining

from the super games computer with multiple video cards. But if you think about... one is the game that's going to be played on that computer with the video cards. Or from a technology  point of view, think about social networks and the way you feel as you engage in those. Emotion is a crucial part of the way we engage with technology. It's part of being human and because we're human, it's part of our lives with the technology.

Irrespective of whether that is deliberate, it is always going to be there. This has been true since the very beginning of the use of technology. All technology, but particularly computing technology. Within Human-Computer Interaction, you can see the roots of this in the late eighties. And these three key words came out at this point. *Effectiveness*, which is, does something do the job you want it to do?

Does it satisfy the need? *Efficiency* – does it do it well? So is the user able to execute whatever they need to do using as few actions as possible, as easily as possible, as easy to remember is possible? But then there is a third word, *satisfaction*. Do they actually enjoy doing what they're doing? So these have been around since the late eighties. They found their way into ISO standards, that first emerged in the early nineties and are the existing standards today,

although they've been updated over the years. So very, very early on it was recognized that satisfaction was crucial. However, if you look back for probably the first 20 years of usability, it was often ignored, to the extent that often when people quoted these from the ISO standards, they quoted effectiveness and efficiency but forgot satisfaction.

Now, even if you're taking a very hard-edged business view of computer use, you're going to install something that's going to run in a large office or something like that. For pure business value, if your employees are happy, then they're likely to be productive. If your customers are happy,  then they're likely to buy your product. Getting the right emotions is critical for business value

as well as for human value and for actually appreciating our users as whole human beings.

As you're designing, it's so easy just to design for the people that you know and for the culture that you know.  However, cultures differ. Now, that's true of many aspects of the interface; no[t] least, though, the visual layout of an interface and the the visual elements. Some aspects are quite easy just to realize like language, others much, much more subtle.

You might have come across, there's two... well, actually there's three terms because some of these are almost the same thing, but two terms are particularly distinguished. One is localization and globalization. And you hear them used almost interchangeably and probably also with slight differences because different authors and people will use them slightly differently. So one thing is localization or internationalization. Although the latter probably only used in that sense. So localization is about taking an interface and making it appropriate

for a particular place. So you might change the interface style slightly. You certainly might change the language for it; whereas global – being globalized – is about saying, "Can I make something that works for everybody everywhere?" The latter sounds almost bound to fail and often does. But obviously, if you're trying to create something that's used across the whole global market, you have to try and do that. And typically you're doing a bit of each in each space.

You're both trying to design as many elements as possible so that they are globally relevant. They mean the same everywhere, or at least are understood everywhere. And some elements where you do localization, you will try and change them to make them more specific for the place. There's usually elements of both. But remembering that distinction, you need to think about both of those. The most obvious thing to think about here is just changing language. I mean, that's a fairly obvious thing and there's lots of tools to make that easy.

So if you have... whether it's menu names or labels, you might find this at the design stage or in the implementation technique, there's ways of creating effectively look-up tables that says this menu item instead of being just a name in the implementation, effectively has an idea or a way of representing it. And that can be looked up so that your menus change, your text changes and everything. Now that sounds like, "Yay, that's it!"

So what it is, is that it's not the end of the story, even for text. That's not the end of the story. Visit Finland sometime. If you've never visited Finland, it's a wonderful place to go. The signs are typically in Finnish and in Swedish. Both languages are used. I think almost equal amounts of people using both languages, their first language, and most will know both. But because of this, if you look at those lines, they're in two languages.

The Finnish line is usually about twice as large as the Swedish piece of text. Because Finnish uses a lot of double letters to represent quite subtle differences in sound. Vowels get lengthened by doubling them. Consonants get separated. So I'll probably pronounce this wrong. But R-I-T-T-A, is not "Rita" which would be R-I-T-A . But "Reet-ta". Actually, I overemphasized that, but "Reetta". There's a bit of a stop.

And I said I won't be doing it right. Talk to a Finnish person, they will help put you right on this. But because of this, the text is twice as long. But of course, suddenly the text isn't going to fit in. So it's going to overlap with icons. It's going to scroll when it shouldn't scroll. So even something like the size of the field becomes something that can change. And then, of course, there's things like left-to-right order. Finnish and Swedish both are left-to-right languages. But if you were going to have, switch something say to an Arabic script from a European script,

then you would end up with things going the other way round. So it's more than just changing the names. You have to think much more deeply than that. But again, it's more than the language. There are all sorts of cultural assumptions that we build into things. The majority of interfaces are built... actually the majority are built not even in just one part of the world, but in one country, you know the dominance... I'm not sure what percentage,

but a vast proportion will be built, not just in the USA, but in the West Coast of the USA. Certainly there is a European/US/American centeredness to the way in which things are designed. It's so easy to design things caught in those cultures without realizing that there are other ways of seeing the world. That changes the assumptions, the sort of values that are built into an interaction.

The meanings of symbols, so ticks and crosses, mostly will get understood and I do continue to use them. However, certainly in the UK, but even not universally across Europe. But in the UK, a tick is a positive symbol, means "this is good". A cross is a "blah, that's bad". However, there are lots of parts of the world where both mean the same. They're both a check. And in fact, weirdly, if I vote in the UK,

I put a cross, not against the candidate I don't want but against the candidate I do want. So even in the UK a cross can mean the same as a tick. You know – and colors, I said I do redundantly code often my crosses with red and my ticks with green because red in my culture is negative; I mean, it's not negative; I like red (inaudible) – but it has that sense of being a red mark is a bad mark.

There are many cultures where red is the positive color. And actually it is a positive color in other ways in Western culture. But particularly that idea of the red cross that you get on your schoolwork; this is not the same everywhere. So, you really have to have quite a subtle understanding of these things. Now, the thing is, you probably won't. And so, this is where if you are taking something into a different culture, you almost certainly will need somebody who quite richly understands that culture.

So you design things so that they are possible for somebody to come in and do those adjustments because you probably may well not be in the position to be able to do that yourself.

So, you might as well go the extra mile and think about the *context of use*. Where's the user using it? What else is going on? What would be helpful to them? You know, and you gain these insights from user observations and research; going to those places and spaces, you know, being in that place – the airport, the hotel, where someone's trying to log in with their phone,

and going through that experience or having them do it and you observe them; maybe talking to them and seeing what their experiences have been with your domain. If you're designing something for a hospital, go to the hospital, go to the waiting room. If you're designing something for a waiting room experience, I talked to a friend who was designing something for a waiting room experience, and they were trying to gamify so that you know where you are and you're not pushed, so it's almost like a leaderboard – you're next up with the doctor. I was thinking: I was like, in a waiting room; what's in a waiting room?

Screaming kids, sick kids; you're sick maybe – maybe your arm's broken; sitting in a chair with other people, there's a social pressure in that situation. So, how could you lighten that up? You know – make it a little less tense. How can you make it a little bit more engaging, and therefore make it more pleasurable or more joyful to sort of wait for the doctor and know how long you have to wait? And that thinking is not impossible, but I had to go there in my mind;

I'll go to where the user is in my mind if I'm brainstorming. But usually I don't do this by brainstorming; I do this by going to places and spaces and observing and bringing that back to my design process, and that is the most important thing.

User research is a crucial part of the design process. It helps to bridge the gap between what we think users need and what users actually need. User research is a systematic process of gathering and analyzing information about the target audience or users of a product, service or system. Researchers use a variety of methods to understand users, including surveys, interviews, observational studies, usability testing, contextual inquiry, card sorting and tree testing, eye tracking

studies, A-B testing, ethnographic research and diary studies. By doing user research from the start, we get a much better product, a product that is useful and sells better. In the product development cycle, at each stage, you’ll different answers from user research. Let's go through the main points. What should we build? Before you even begin to design you need to validate your product idea. Will my users need this? Will they want to use it? If not this, what else should we build?

To answer these basic questions, you need to understand your users everyday lives, their motivations, habits, and environment. That way your design a product relevant to them. The best methods for this stage are qualitative interviews and observations. Your visit users at their homes at work, wherever you plan for them to use your product. Sometimes this stage reveals opportunities no one in the design team would ever have imagined. How should we build this further in the design process?

You will test the usability of your design. Is it easy to use and what can you do to improve it? Is it intuitive or do people struggle to achieve basic tasks? At this stage you'll get to observe people using your product, even if it is still a crude prototype. Start doing this early so your users don't get distracted by the esthetics. Focus on functionality and usability. Did we succeed? Finally, after the product is released, you can evaluate the impact of the design.

How much does it improve the efficiency of your users work? How well does the product sell? Do people like to use it? As you can see, user research is something that design teams must do all the time to create useful, usable and delightful products.

What physics can work with this physical environment and what can work against it to create narrative tension. It's a Friday afternoon and you're taking your daughter, granddaughter, niece to the park and there's a big tree in the park and you're you open up an air app and you want to learn about squirrels and the life of a squirrel. And one of the things, of course, is the squirrels prepare for the winter

by hiding their food, their nuts under the ground in really random odd places. And the squirrels kind of describing to you why it's doing that. And it's working itself up in a little bit of a frenzy, because whenever it talks about hiding those nuts, Right, there's always that pressure of the winter coming. And it's a little educational thing, but there's a game piece to it that you're going to take back home. So say goodbye to the squirrel. You head back home as soon as you get home

to your kitchen or living room, there's a table and chairs. Maybe you pull out the chair and right there in the chair, turn on your air experience, look into the chair, and there's a pile of nuts. And the squirrel appears. The the hologram of the squirrel shows up again. And this time the squirrel is burying the nuts, continuing the story. And he's burying the nuts in real physical places using the physics of your environment.

So story space, right? So underneath your couch, underneath a chair in your kitchen under a rug, and that's your, you know, in the side of a wall. And and the game is for you then to to find those because the squirrels moving really quickly and doing what they do a lot of digging. And then they also actually put the nuts in there. So he's just kind of pouring them in and and and the tension there, if we look at this from a story arc perspective, the narrative tension, so discovery of the nuts on the chair and

we could add some affordances like every time he he digs a hole, it creates like a glowing kind of a blue glowing affordances to help you kind of remember spatially. You know, it's under the couch, it's under the chair and the conflict we could introduce the narrative tension could be like the cold winter wind come in, maybe some snowflakes, the squirrel getting anxious and it kind of jumping up and down. And and then when you help the squirrel and pick up the nuts, it the

the squirrel gets really happy and does like a very happy dance at the end. So that's, that's the the narrative arc or the story arc for that very short tightened up journey.

So feelings clearly matter in a user interface. That's why we worry about user experience. But depending on the kind of product, the kind of service, the kind of system you're creating, then feelings matter in different ways. So I'm going to distinguish two major ways this can be. So first of all, where emotion is the primary goal of what you're designing.

So eliciting that emotion is the very purpose of the product. So think about art. Think about games, entertainment applications in general. What you're trying to do is create a *sense of emotion* in the person. That's the primary goal. Other things are secondary. Now, in order to satisfy that primary goal, you often need to get *good functionality* and *good usability*.

So when you’re wanting to choose what movie to watch, you want to be able to find, perhaps, the box set that you know is there and the right episode of it as efficiently as possible. So you still have these fundamental usability requirements, even if the primary goal is emotion. But it's often the things that serve that. So think about again, if you're going to share a picture you just taken a picture of, whether it's a meal you're eating

or your cats or whatever else you're wanting to share, the sharing is about the emotional impact that you're wanting to pass on to other people, to your friends, and to your family. However, when you take that photograph, you want a very efficient, slick and easy process to actually get that shared on your social media channels. So, again, although emotion is the primary purpose of what you're doing, you still need the usability and functionality in order to support that process.

Alternatively, emotion might be a secondary goal. So the primary purpose might be something that's more, shall we say, business like. It might be about your work. So like I'm doing now, producing this video, it might be about office work, might be using a spreadsheet, using a database, might be about getting your money from the ATM and get the money out of the hole in the wall.

It might be about paying using your card in a restaurant. But the thing you're trying to do at that point, the primary goal is to get the thing done efficiently and effectively. However, typically, emotions help. They help in the sense that if you're doing, say, a repetitive job, then being alert is important. You know, this is true whether you're a policeman on the beat and watching out, or a soldier in a battlefield situation.

Whether you're driving your car and needing to sort of have a little bit of peripheral awareness. So emotion helps you do that. It helps you keep alert so that you're ready for things. So if you think about online shopping. Some of online shopping is about getting the job done and getting the thing purchased. But there's also an aspect of shopping, this is particularly true of offline shopping. Of when you go into a clothes shop where

the actual process of doing the shopping is part of the joy of the shopping. It's harder to do that online, incidentally. But there are some brands where that is the thing you’re trying to do. You're trying to create a sense of identity in the brand, a sense of joy in exploring it. So within the same kind of application area, online shopping, depending on the brand and depending on the person's need at that moment,

you might want to emphasize one or the other.

Do you know this feeling? You have a plane to catch. You arrive at the airport. Well in advance. But you still get stressed. Why is that? Designed with empathy. Bad design versus good design. Let's look into an example of bad design. We can learn from one small screen.

Yes, it's easy to get an overview of one screen, but look close. The screen only shows one out of three schools. That means that the passengers have to wait for up to 4 minutes to find out where to check in. The airport has many small screenings, but they all show the same small bits of information. This is all because of a lack of empathy. Now, let's empathize with all users airport passengers,

their overall need to reach their destination. Their goal? Catch their plane in time. Do they have lots of time when they have a plane to catch? Can they get a quick overview of their flights? Do they feel calm and relaxed while waiting for the information which is relevant to them? And by the way, do they all speak Italian? You guessed it, No. Okay. This may sound hilarious to you, but some designers

actually designed it. Galileo Galilei, because it is the main airport in Tuscany, Italy. They designed an airport where it's difficult to achieve the goal to catch your planes. And it's a stressful experience, isn't it? By default. Stressful to board a plane? No. As a designer, you can empathize with your users needs and the context they're in.

Empathize to understand which goals they want to achieve. Help them achieve them in the best way by using the insights you've gained through empathy. That means that you can help your users airport passengers fulfill their need to travel to their desired destination, obtain their goal to catch their plane on time. They have a lot of steps to go through in order to catch that plane. Design the experience so each step is as quick and smooth as possible

so the passengers stay all become calm and relaxed. The well, the designers did their job in Dubai International Airport, despite being the world's busiest airport. The passenger experience here is miles better than in Galileo Galilei. One big screen gives the passengers instant access to the information they need. Passengers can continue to check in right away. This process is fast and creates a calm experience,

well-organized queues help passengers stay calm and once. Let's see how poorly they designed queues. It's. Dubai airport is efficient and stress free. But can you, as a designer, make it fun and relaxing as well? Yes.

In cheerful airport in Amsterdam, the designers turned parts of the airport into a relaxing living room with sofas and big piano chairs. The designers help passengers attain a calm and happy feeling by adding elements from nature. They give kids the opportunity to play. Adults can get some revitalizing massage. You can go outside to enjoy a bit of real nature.

You can help create green energy while you walk out the door. Charge your mobile, buy your own human power while getting some exercise. Use empathy in your design process to see the world through other people's eyes. To see what they see, feel what they feel and experience things as they do. This is not only about airport design. You can use these insights when you design

apps, websites, services, household machines, or whatever you're designing. Interaction Design Foundation.