How emotion impacts behavior

I have been researching Emotional design for the last 5 years and I am still excited to feel that there are still a lot of things to get explored.

During these years I faced some unique challenges like:

Why users are so choosy?
What makes the user happy?
Why do some users like or dislike your product?

I love my car.
I am in love with your smartwatch.
I hate this coffee machine.
These are some lines we hear in our daily lives.

One thing is very common among these lines. That is Emotions. We can not live without it.

Emotions are ingrained into our behaviours, they are an integral part of our life.

So as designers we should know how we can use emotions to benefits our products? We need to understand how do emotions impact user behaviours?

We all are emotional beings or I can say hysterical beings and not robots. Feeling matters a lot for all of us.

I have seen a lot of organizations that try to develop solutions with good emphatic values. They try to make products more usable.

Do they actually know how to improve upon the usability factors of a product?

Usability has 3 main aspects:

1. Effectiveness
2. Efficiency
3. Satisfaction

I really feel strongly that most of us ignore the 3rd aspect of the phenomena. The reason being we don’t know how to use this aspect to make products better.

This is the bridge between Usability and Emotional design.

Satisfaction is not quantitive but Qualitative in nature. It is really unreal to measure user satisfaction. It’s a feeling that users have, and therefore is qualitative. Therefore we need to rely on the emotional aspects of it to improve the usability of the product.

Our emotional state is constantly shifting according to stimulation from our environment. While emotions can be experienced without such stimulation, most changes occur as a result of some outside force.

We refer to as ‘emotions’ are psychophysiological changes, which occur naturally and, as stated above, due to events in our surroundings. These changes are mediated by our cognition (i.e. how we interpret information), our disposition (i.e. how we feel at the time) and environmental factors (i.e. things taking place outside the person’s body).

So we need to understand how to make users feel happy when they are using our products taking cognition, disposition and environmental factors into consideration while designing solutions.