See how state-of-mind impacts product usability & user experience
I learned a lot of things working on a healthcare product but none of the lessons were as impactful as my new perspective on users. Going in, I was under the impression that our users were a different demographic. I was often told that doctors are unique and that sick people tend to be old and technophobic. Sadly, I bought into this concept and it colored my expectations of users. I’ve since realized that mindset is utterly untrue and it made me a worse designer while making our products harder to use.
Doctors and patients are not a unique demographic. Instead what others called weird I’ve come to understand as a more exaggerated emotional state. This exaggeration is more likely to impact their expectations and ability to use what I built.
Every person who interacts with an interface, brings their emotional state to the table with them. I’m not talking about the reaction to an experience. In that case someone might say this interaction made me frustrated or it made me happy. If you want to learn about emotions that UX creates, Don Norman wrote a great book on the subject.
Instead, I’m referring to a frame of reference based on life circumstances. Are they in a hurry? Might the need to make correct decisions be extremely stressful? Is she exhausted? Is he scared? All humans have an existing emotional context that colors every interaction with products. How do these situational context feelings impact a person’s ability to understand content or move through a process? In other words interactions from Facebook to online banking to patient engagement, show usability isn’t just how something makes us feel. It also needs to account for how we feel before an interaction.
An example:
When I get hungry, I stop thinking straight. Interestingly the more hungry I become, the less I am able to decide what I want to eat. I enter a state of decision paralysis where no food sounds appealing. Imagine that in such a “hunger” state I attempt to order a meal online. Menu categories, customization options and a checkout process that passed usability tests with flying colors irk and confuse me.
“Can’t they just pick for me? I don’t want to spend time going through the categories. Wait I’m lactose intolerant but I’m so hungry I already put something in my cart. Now I need to customize it…”
Those and many more thoughts run through my head before I manage to submit my order. My experience doesn’t stop there either. I’m now so hungry that I’m short with the very nice restaurant employees at pickup. I leave a horrible tip. And, since this entire experience is associated with the powerful emotion of hunger + failure, the company’s brand is now linked to a bad connotation in my mind.
So what happened here? The usability test group probably didn’t perform the tasks while hungry. Meaning the results of the test don’t equate to real life usage. Granted I exaggerated that example to make a point but at least in that case there wasn’t much at stake besides my growling stomach. Imagine instead that you were trying to use a similar system to choose a treatment for your extremely sick child. How would that impact your rational decision making skills? Or in a less scary scenario, how might your interactions with Tinder differ directly after a messy break-up?
To be fair, emotional state probably isn’t that big a deal for a pizza ordering app. But it becomes a huge issue when the stakes are higher. If you’re building tools for healthcare, law enforcement, military and education, the user’s emotion starts to matter a lot more. In these areas design can have a massive impact on the completion of highly important tasks meaning it’s a big deal to meet the user where they are.
The Science
There’s plenty of science proving the relationship between how we feel and our physical abilities. As humans we claim to have control over our actions but often fail to acknowledge the way our emotional state affects our physiology. Athletes for example have learned to mentally visualize giving a top performance or scoring a goal. This is a way of removing the psychological effects of competition from the action they wish to achieve. More often than not this concept works, proving a direct link between our expected ability to perform a task and the reality of it happening. But there’s a catch. Visualizing a result requires an incredible amount of focus. Focus is a luxury your users likely don’t have.
Without diving too deep, mental stress has been linked to poor decision making ability. Fear is linked to decreased motor control. Sleep deprivation is linked to a decreased ability to focus. All three significantly decrease reading and concept comprehension. If your audience falls into just one of those categories how might that impact their ability to complete tasks, use your service or buy your product?
Ok so how do we make products and services that account for users’ emotional states? Since each interaction and expected outcome is different, there’s no simple solution. Instead we need to modify steps in the traditional user experience process to help us identify the impact of a person’s unique context.
Personas & Empathy
Design documentation should call out expected emotional states. Use personas to improve empathy. Remind your team that use cases likely won’t happen in a sterile environment. Better yet, as a designer, provide yourself with the tools for real empathy. Try talking to patients, ask for a ride along in the cop car or talk to a psychologist. Working to understand your audience's’ emotional state will vastly improve both the design solution and the experience of its use.
Interface + Interaction
If emotional states like fatigue and stress decrease human motor skills or comprehension, we should be especially careful in creating interfaces. While it's generally a good idea to simplify visuals as much as possible, simplicity alone is likely not enough. Can you comprehend actions based on simple text? Could you replace text with commonly understood iconography? Do sizes allow for less precision? Do steps in a task present themselves in a logical order? I’m just scratching the surface of things you could tackle at this point. What’s important is that during the interface design phase we remember the context in which the interface will be used.
Once reasonably complete, try desaturating (turning it grayscale) your interface. The lack of color changes how we understand hierarchy and positive/negative space. Does the primary task or expected goal still seem primary without color? Perhaps your audience can only dedicate a limited amount of mental energy to your product. Will it work? Try holding a conversation with a co-worker while completing tasks in your interface. It's a great way to reduce both your focus and comprehension. You’ll find out very quickly if you’ve made the interface easy to understand.
Pro tip: Simulate the “fat finger” effect by using touch enabled gloves. You’ll be amazed how much space is required for a comfortable touch area.
Testing
We can all agree that testing is hugely important. However, a lack of proper setup might be skewing the results. It's important to help the tester get into the right mindset. You probably can’t test on a “live fire range” to induce fear and it might not be nice to starve your testers. But you might ask someone to imagine a scenario as part of the setup. Perhaps you want to alter the test environment. Could you visit a crowded, noisy place like a mall? Could music or ambient sound enhance emotions? Maybe you want to go full method with haunted house psychology. I’ll leave the technique up to you. The takeaway here is to improve results by helping your testers empathize with the real audience.
In the end, I believe simple awareness can go a very long way toward accounting for emotional impact. Remember great products are not created in a vacuum. You must understand your users, sometimes better than they understand themselves.
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