Apps Are Getting All Emotional
Emotional
design isn't just for you and your feelings. It makes the software
better too.
A
growing wave of apps is hoping to really get you.
While
the tech industry is often seen as more interested in engineering
than emotions, some designers are aspiring to engender a more
affecting user experience, and build tools for us to develop our own
emotional intelligence.
One
example of tech’s shift toward battling angst instead of obsessing
over analytics is Emojiary,
a new app that encourages you to journal daily using only emojis—by
a company that embraces a feeling-based approach to design.
"There’s
an interesting emerging trend around how to track your behavior,
usually around physical activity," explains Albert Lee,
the founder and managing partner of the New York-based product
studio All Tomorrows.
Emojiary, Lee suggests, is more like a smartwatch but for your
feelings.
In
an era of social media and the quantified self, mood tracking is on
the rise. There are a handful of smart phoneapps designed to track
your feelings, whether by asking you to input data (like MoodScope)
or gathering data passively, about where you may be or the content of
your Facebook posts (like Moodit).
(According to a project at Rice University, app use and phone calls
correlate with better moods). Affectiva, an emotion-analysis app
developed at MIT that uses facial recognition to detect mood, has
already been used by advertisers and marketers and may soon land on
your phone. Some "mindfulness" apps, like Melon or Muse,
rely on EEG-sensing headbands to monitor and track your brainwave
patterns.
And
already, the largest web companies are gathering data around user
emotions and designing for it. Spotify can correlate a user's mood
with the kind of music they listen to, while Facebook is able to read
the emotional content of users' news feeds and tweak them
accordingly..
When Designers Get Emotional Too
Not
all emotionally designed apps are about emotions per se, the way they
are in Emojiary. There’s also a larger trend of designers taking
into account emotional context as a baked-in feature of a product's
design.
Aaron Walter,the director of user experience at MailChimp, told me that his own
approach to designing at MailChimp sought to address one of the most
enormous stresses of the web: the feeling you get at that particular
moment when you're about to press send on a giant email campaign. In
the past, he explains, "designers have just been shooting for
making a usable product and not creating an emotional experience."
That's
not enough, Walter says: "Designers shooting for useful is like
a chef shooting for edible."
And
considering the competitive landscape out there, apps must go beyond
usability and functionality and strive to create a compelling
emotional experience.
In
his 2011 book Designing
for Emotion,
Walter explains what he means by emotional design: design with
personality that encourages empathy and a sense of connection with a
human. To achieve this warmer sensibility, he suggests using cute
mascots, personal idiosyncrasies, and favors layouts that use the
golden ratio rather than grid-like structures.
All
Tomorrows is also designing with emotions in mind, and pays a
similar, holistic attention to user experience. Lee, who has a
background in design and architecture—he's worked at 2X4 and
Ideo—says that at every step his studio aims to avoid stress and
uncertainty and encourage engagement in their apps, and these
principles inform their UX design process as well.
That
design begins in the first moments of the app, in an onboarding
process that aims to give the user a sense of a journey. "All
spaces are experiences that have a set of flows embedded with them,"
Lee says. That flow, he says, is something to be considered in app
design as much as it is in IRL space.
In
designing their app to take into account the user’s emotional
context, All Tomorrows is focused explicitly on a more internal and
ethereal journey, in which the user gets in touch with their
emotions. Lee noted that an impetus for the app was that a growing
number of people report feeling unhappy. In both form and content,
the app’s emotional design is about supporting the user.
For
Emojiary, this means encouraging users to reflect on how they’re
feeling. In their qualitative research, which involved a lot of
listening, talking to people in their living rooms and at their
kitchen tables and hearing their stories, Lee and his team found that
even this simple exercise made people feel guilty. "We heard
that emotions were perceived as self-indulgent," said Lee.
"People would say, ‘Me spending time thinking about what I’m
feeling, that just seems so luxurious.’"
In
a culture that too often privileges analyzing Pew studies over blue
feelings, and numbers to the point of numbness, emojis have emerged
as a kind of pictorial protest. From Emoji-only chat apps and social
networks to the bootleg Emoji Beyonce "Drunk In Love" music
videos, it’s clear these 2.0-era hieroglyphics strike a chord with
people, and according to a
New
York magazine's
reporter’s anecdotal research, they’re
popular not just among teens and tweens, but moms and dads too. They
give us the nuances we have in IRL communication with body language
that are often lost in text-only talk.
Lee
noted that during beta testing and surveys, users found traditional
journaling much more daunting than expressing themselves with emojis.
(Britain's
National Heath Service recently began promoting similar,
emotion-recording apps.) It
makes sense that for the emotionally- stunted or shamed—and
for most modern humans, really—smiley faces and cartoons of shrimp
tempura can sometimes seem like an easier way to engage with complex
feelings than translating them into words.
Historically,
a culture of self-reflection has been restricted to a certain class.
"Therapy’s extremely expensive," notes Lee. And although
Emojiary is not a clinical tool, it can be a helpful habit. And
thanks to a small group of angel investors, Emojiary doesn’t cost a
cent. "Technology gives us the ability to provide tools that are
supportive to as broad a population as possible," says Lee.
Free
downloads aside, the end goal of a lot of emotional design is still
profit. For all the warm fuzzy feels, it can still make you cold hard
cash. Walter points to Apple as the best illustration of a company
that's been wildly successful with its designs that are very human
and encourage users to see themselves in their products. The pulsing
light on their laptops and desktops, for example, is designed to
mimic the breathing rate of an average human at rest.
"I
feel like there’s a great opportunity for designers right now to
think about the emotional context and design something that makes the
user feel like they are interacting with a human on the other end,"
says Walter, "and not just a computer."
The
more worldly benefits of using emotional design can feel really good.
"There are a number of companies that are doing that really well
and they reap the benefits," he adds, not needing to name names.
"They make a shit-ton of money."
By
Whitney Mallett
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3039624/apps-are-getting-all-emotional?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-manual-newsletter&position=anjali&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=12112014
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