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Demo UX Cases
Emotional design becomes increasingly important on the web. More and more companies try to add a personal touch to their site to express personality, engage visitors and illustrate their content. Out of curiosity, we set up a quick visual survey with Usabilla to find out what effects emotional design elements really have on your visitors.
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Design
This is a guest post by David Miller
Emotional design, the trend of integrating UX elements with the primary goal of prompting user emotion (humor, trust, etc), is becoming an increasingly popular trend in user interface design.
If you own any part of the design or development process of a website or app, and you feel like you’re missing that extra hook to keep users coming back, emotional design might be an angle worth exploring. My name is David, I’m the founder of SlugBooks: a kayak for college textbooks (our users save money by comparing prices on their college textbooks). In this article I’ll be sharing the evolution of our website design, and the various strategies we used to build emotion into our product.
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Design
Typography is an essential part of any website. There is no doubt about it. Websites usually offer information and the easiest way to present this information is through text. Besides, “people who are reading a well typeset page are more engaged in the experience and find that time flies by faster.” Good typography is not only a convenient carrier for information, it can also help to engage our website visitors.
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Design
The user experience of a website has gained quite some importance in the last couple of years. A website is expected to be functional, reliable, and efficient nowadays. Besides these basics, it also needs to be engaging and fun. In order to stand out from your competitors and to make a lasting impression, you need to offer your visitors an experience worth remembering. You need to make sure they actually enjoy your website.
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Design
Sometimes, it’s very easy to convince us. Be it in a discussion with friends, when buying a new pair of shoes, or when searching for a web service on the the Internet, if our intuition tells us to go for it, we feel confident that we are making the right decision. Then, other times, it seems like our intuition deserts us and it takes a lot more convincing to win us over for something.
It’s not a secret that our brains are capable of two different types of thinking. While the “left brain” can be considered rather objective, focusing on logic and analytics, the “right brain” is more subjective, emotional, and intuitive. Whether we use the left or the right part of our brain does not only affect our decision making, but also the way we perceive a website and how we interact with it.
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Theory
This is a guest post by Melonie McLaurin.
To say that Apple invented the smartphone is a controversial statement, given that RIM’s Blackberry already had a strong foothold before the iPhone arrived. Yet everyone knows it is true, before the iPhone, there was nothing like it. It was a dubious sell from the beginning; what seemed at first to be a strange new iPod that could also handle calls, text messages, and email launched an entire mobile industry.
Now, smartphones are everywhere and Apple no longer dominates the market. Over 900,000 daily activations of mobile devices powered by Google’s Android operating system is proof of that. Even Microsoft has started moving in with Windows Phone, and it is rumored that Facebook will soon introduce a social smartphone. With so many choices, what is it that keeps iPhone devotees loyal to Apple?
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Design
It goes without saying that the best way to go about errors is to avoid them. People neither have the time nor the nerves to deal with technical problems, while browsing your site with a certain goal in mind. So you should do everything in your power to avoid errors.
Yet, there is little you can do about the unexpected. No matter how hard you try, some users will run into a dead end at some point. It might or not be your fault, but you should be prepared for when it happens.
Customized 404 error pages have become the rule. We see them almost every time that we try to visit a broken or non-existing link. Webmasters have realized that classic 404 error messages can have a negative impact on the user experience. They are negatively phrased, boring and for most people too technical to truly understand. Customized error pages on the other hand can have a positive impact.
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Design
This article was originally and in full length published on Smashing Magazine. Please visit the original source for the entire text, including many visual examples.
Emotional design has become a powerful tool in creating exceptional user experiences for websites. However, emotions did not use to play such an important role on the Web. Actually, they did not use to play any role at all; rather, they were drowned by a flood of rational functionality and efficiency.
We were so busy trying to adapt to the World Wide Web as a new medium that we lost sight of its full potential. Instead of using the Internet on our terms, we adapted to its technical and, at first, impersonal nature. If it wasn’t for visionary contemporaries such as Don Norman or Aarron Walter, we might still be focusing on improving processes, neglecting the potential of emotional design.
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Theory
There are many ways to experience the world around us. Especially offline, we can make use of our different senses to collect information, interpret our environment and make judgments. On the Web, however, our senses are more limited. As designers, we need to present information carefully to make sure our users think, feel and do the right thing.
A great way to help your users understand abstract content, create a sense of familiarity, trigger emotions, draw attention, and motivate action are metaphors.
- The way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.
– Lakoff and Johnson
Let’s look at five reasons why metaphors can have such an influence on your user experience. For the full article, including examples, please visit Six Revisions.
Demo UX Cases
We recently wrote about how beauty brands seduce you with emotional design. It was great fun to look at different beauty brands, identify emotional concepts on their websites and make assumptions on how they draw us in. To back up our findings, we invited people to participate in a test case. Now the results are in and it’s even more fun to see how they underpin our hypothesis. Feedback from about 100 participants shows that beauty brands really do appeal to our emotions – but not only to seduce us, also to build their brand and make us trust them.
For clarity, let’s quickly recall the brands that were included in the test: Nivea, Olay, Dove, L’Oréal Paris, Clinique, Garnier and Axe. We gave people the following three tasks for each website: