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Written by Chris Mears User Experience Designer chris.mears@cimex.com Cimex Media Ltd 53-55 Scrutton Street London EC2A 4PJ T +44 (0)20 7324 7780 F +44 (0)20 7324 7781 www.cimex.com
However, rather than using this technique to map completed designs or wireframes; we think it should be applied earlier in the process to USER JOURNEYS This has a number of benefits: You can get a handle of whether key journeys are going to leave the user in a positive emotional state You can identify areas that are eliciting negative emotions and make sure they are counteracted with opposing, positive emotions You dont need to make changes to design mock-ups or wireframes, which can take time
It helps think about and assign values to what emotional state users are in before they even engage with your system
It gives your personas real life emotions and assesses how well your system caters for each one on an emotional level
Lets take our registration example and see how we can map the changes in the users state across a basic journey.
As we can see, the registration process and purchasing process has left our user in an emotional state of +4, giving him an overall positive experience. Personas really come into their own using this method, as you can start to explore how different people interact emotionally with your designs. It can also help guide you in business decisions about certain functionality or features. If a client really pushes for a feature, but you can demonstrate in the user journeys that the feature will actually leave the user in a lower emotional state because of it, your argument will carry a lot more weight.
Trust (+2)
Interest (+1)
Sadness (+2)
Distraction (-1)
Interest (+1)
Here we can see sadness being used as a positive emotion to encourage from the user in order to get them to donate to the cause. For this persona, the page appears to work effectively, with an emotion score of +5.
Try it with a persona who wants to get in contact to reduce their monthly donations, as they just found out too much money is being taken from their account , and the page tells a different story.
Distraction (-1)
Annoyance (-1)
Distraction (-1)
Annoyance (-1)
The user begins the interaction in a state of anger at (-2). Any donation messages are now adding to their agrivation, and there is little trust left to counterbalance the negative emotions. To make matters worse there is no contact link easily available. The user ends up with an emotion score of -6. This page is maybe not working as hard as it could for this particular use case.
1.5 Conclusion
Quantifying emotion is a tricky thing, and often its quite intangible. Without years of experience in behavioural psychology its difficult to get a grip on users emotions, even when you are observing them directly. However, the benefits of an emotionally impactful customer journey are real and can be measured in increased conversion rates and often thousands or millions of pounds! By using this method can go some way towards creating more persuasive journeys that leave customers with more positive feelings about the brand at their end. And after all isnt that he point? Positive experiences lead to heightened audience engagement, brand loyalty and ultimately customer value.