UX: Time to get emotional

In Tales from a Trading Desk, this week Matt Davey has picked up on an interesting article about UX and ROI.

I like this sound bite:

Also, if you create great UX it will always lead to better user satisfaction, joy and happiness - and it’s a well know fact that happier users are - better and more motivated and productive workers.

My take on what makes a great UX…

For me a great UX:

• Turns users into advocates leading to an increase in most of these ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ metrics by default
• Should be analogous with great typography: transparent, ease information comprehension and consumption
• Doesn’t interrupt the ‘experience flow’
• Considers ‘emotional design’ and the users emotional responses.

UX: Time to get emotional

I started thinking about how I capture the ‘emotion’ of an experience.

It would be interesting to add some emotional user metrics to the list of elements, over and above just ‘Customer Satisfaction’:

I’ve been following the development of Emotional Design over at the Design & Emotion Society for a while and researching the emotional responses to images and text - following some ideas from ‘Persuasive Imagery edited by Linda M. Scott and Rajeev Batra’.

Capturing the desired emotional response and the actual user response is a fuzzy area, but the tools are getting better all the time.

I’m wondering if quantifying the emotional response is the real driver for discovering valuable ROI within technology? Don Norman discusses this in an interview over at Design & Emotion.

I apply these factors to my UX Design at Caplin. Although the domain of SDPs (Single Dealer Platforms) for financial trading is typically seen as an area where emotions are kept in check, we are finding that the reality is different and user emotions matter as much here as anywhere else.