User experience = Emotional experience + Psychological experience
By: Nate Girard
Tags: User Research, UX, Emotions, Psychology, User Experience

User experience = Emotional experience + Psychological experience

Illustrated by Nate Girard

Humans are best at making decisions based on human judgements and managing human relationships with empathy. Humans are emotional creatures with psychological needs that must also be met in order to succeed and not burn out. As a human experiences your application, they experience both psychological and emotional responses that together make up most of the perceived user experience. Let’s call these Emotional Experience and Psychological Experience, subsets of User Experience. Together they help formulate a human’s foundational reactions to the task they are expected to perform within our application and carry the most weight when it comes to perceived overall User Experience (UX). These aren’t the ONLY factors in user experience but they are the most fundamental ones that often get overlooked when doing UX Design because it’s easier to push pixels than to address fundamental problems in your application.

Emotional Experience Identifies What Needs Fixing

We’re going to measure Emotional Experience with Emoticons 🤓 because they quickly convey emotions visually. Typically these can be discovered by performing a Journey Mapping interview on users of your application and synthesizing a roughly aggregated Journey Map of a user within the application. There is a great article on that process here . I highly recommend doing these as it is 😳 to see the results coming out of the mouths of your users. It will help you develop empathy for them and to WANT to help fix the issues they are having. If, however, you don’t have the time, resources, or support to do such an analysis, then it’s up to YOU to do the exercise yourself. Sit in a chair and actually USE your application to DO what you expect your users to do day in and day out and to log all of YOUR emotional states as you use the application. Preferably you would do this as an entire UX team so you can simulate multi user interactions and also raise awareness of the variety of emotional journeys that are possible within your application. Whenever you feel an emotion, write down what caused the emotion and add an emoticon that most accurately represents your emotional response. You’ll end up with something like this.

Failed to log in because I forgot my password. 😅 Forced to use 2 factor authentication but my phone is dead. 😡 Forgot answers to my security question. 🤔 Called IT to have an admin reset my password. 🙄 Finally logged in 🥳

It’s funny how relatable these are. They may not all have been in the same experience but everyone has experienced these problems logging into systems before. So the first question you should be asking is WHY is this happening?

Psychological Experience Explains WHY It Needs Fixing

Next we are going to use basic psychology to understand why users are having these emotional reactions and then conjure up potential solutions that will improve their emotional state by catering to their psychological state in different ways. This will alter their psychological experience whereby enhancing their emotional experience and improving their overall user experience.

Look at your emotional journey map. At each low point ask yourself what psychological need isn’t being fulfilled that results in poor emotional state? Emotions are the result of friction with your product. There is a functional need that has a psychological impact which manifests in an emotion that is required in the process there. Emotional Experience is the indicator by which you measure where improvements can be made and also where your delighters and key product differentiators will exist.

In the example above, the first emotional response to forgetting your password is embarrassment. Yeah, you should really know your password but it’s hard to remember all of your passwords, especially with how frequently they all change! This puts stress on your brain to remember these things and psychologically you feel like you dropped the ball. Some people’s brains will punish themselves at this point for forgetting. Others will not expect the brain to hold the responsibility of remembering, that should have been my browser or password manager’s responsibility! If you have a password manager then this probably doesn’t happen to you frequently but you must be authenticated with your password manager for this to be effective which is yet another thing you are pressured to do so you can avoid this embarrassment moment and the psychological stress involved. But what if you didn’t need to remember a password at all?

Look for solutions that result in better psychological state and emotional reaction

Apple looked at this problem and decided we can solve this another way. Authentication is merely verifying the identity of someone with two of the three ways: something you know, something you have, and something you are. Now people have phones with fingerprint recognition and facial recognition built in for unlocking them. Some computers even have fingerprint recognition now. What if your authentication happened whenever you looked at your computer/phone and we no longer needed to authenticate on a website but rather used onboard hardware authentication mechanisms like facial recognition to authenticate you? What if your computer/phone knew who you were when you looked at it instead of forcing you to log in every time and then passed that authentication information along the chain to every website you visited? 🤯 Suddenly Apple’s turned an emotional experience from 😅 to 😊 not to mention how much time is saved from needing to log into every website throughout the day that you interact with.

Rather than accepting the emotional experience that users have day in and day out, challenge it! These are the biggest missed opportunities to improve your product and improve your users perception of your product in a positive way.

For every emotional experience that can be flipped from bad to good by implementing a solution that alters the psychological state of the user, the better your user experience gets. The more of these you do that your competition does NOT do, the more delighters your product will have that sets it apart from the competition. Humans will begin to expect better user experiences because designers will be thinking about their psychological state of mind and building products to hack it so they can get good emotional experiences.

For the next part in this series I’ll use this methodology to perform an in-depth analysis on a common design pattern — the Work List.

Related articles:

Work List Friction — List Management

Work List Friction — Work Assignment

Work List Friction — Polishing the Experience