How can you use EI to better understand user emotions and improve your designs?

1 What are user emotions and why do they matter?

User emotions are the feelings that users experience when they interact with your product or service. They can be positive, such as joy, satisfaction, or trust, or negative, such as frustration, anxiety, or anger. User emotions matter because they influence how users perceive your value proposition, engage with your features, and recommend your brand. By understanding user emotions, you can design solutions that meet their needs, expectations, and preferences.

2 How to use EI to research user emotions

Conducting user interviews is one of the ways to use EI to research user emotions. During these conversations, you should ask open-ended questions to learn about users' goals, motivations, pain points, and emotional responses. To use EI in user interviews effectively, you should prepare relevant and empathetic questions that explore users' feelings and emotions. Additionally, you should listen actively and attentively to users' stories and feedback, use verbal and non-verbal cues to show interest and rapport, ask follow-up questions to clarify and probe deeper into users' emotions, and summarize and reflect back what you heard to confirm your understanding.

3 How to use EI to analyze user emotions

Another way to use EI to analyze user emotions is to create user personas. User personas are fictional representations of your ideal users based on your research data. They include demographic, behavioral, and psychological characteristics, as well as user goals, needs, and frustrations. To use EI in creating user personas, you need to identify the common patterns and themes among your users' emotions, segment them into different groups based on their emotional profiles, give each persona a name, a photo, and a backstory that captures their emotional context, and use quotes and scenarios to illustrate how each persona feels and behaves in relation to your product or service.

4 How to use EI to ideate user emotions

Using EI to ideate user emotions can involve emotion mapping, which is a visual tool that helps to map out how users feel throughout their journey with a product or service. It can help identify emotional highs and lows, triggers and drivers, and opportunities and challenges for improving user experience. To use EI in emotion mapping, you need to define the stages and steps of the user journey, plot the emotional states of your user personas at each stage and step, use colors, symbols, or words to indicate the intensity and valence of the emotions, analyze the gaps between desired and actual emotions, and generate ideas for enhancing positive emotions and reducing negative emotions.

5 How to use EI to prototype user emotions

Using EI to prototype user emotions also involves employing emotional design, which is a design approach that seeks to evoke certain emotions in users through the combination of aesthetics, functionality, and usability. This can help you create products or services that are not only functional but also pleasurable and meaningful. To use EI in emotional design, you should first define the emotional goals and outcomes of your product or service. Then, choose the appropriate design elements such as colors, shapes, fonts, images, sounds, or animations that match the desired emotions. Afterward, test your prototypes with user personas and observe their emotional reactions. Finally, iterate and refine your prototypes based on the feedback and data you collect.

6 How to use EI to evaluate user emotions

Using EI to evaluate user emotions can be done through emotional metrics, which are quantitative or qualitative measures that help assess the impact of your product or service on users' emotions. To use EI in emotional metrics, you must select relevant and reliable metrics that align with your emotional goals and outcomes, collect data from various sources such as surveys, ratings, reviews, or analytics, interpret and report the findings and insights that relate to users' emotions, and use the findings and insights to inform decisions for improving your product or service. Emotional metrics can help validate assumptions, track performance, and optimize results.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?