Do You Speak Human, Software?
By: Olga Kouzina
Tags: User Experience, UX Design, Product Development, UX, UI

Here’s the list of basic human emotional needs:

As I tried to map the emotional needs to digital experiences, it turned out that software could account for about 60% of them (what’s your take?).

Let’s see how software does this job.

Mint

Mint is a personal finance tool, and it appeals a lot to our sense of safety and security.

“Remember kids, safety first” is a strong emotional caller. The lock with the mint leaf is smoother, but still emotional. The part on bank-level security appeals to our logical reasoning.

Next one:

The ban sign says it all. There’s no real $$ here, rest assured, no one will touch your money, including you.

You’re cared about when you see this:

The concept of “mint” (and a mint leaf) runs deep. Which mental/emotional connection might we have with the word “mint” and the image of mint? It’s something comforting, soothing, something that makes us free from worries and anxiety. That’s a great emotional token for a personal finance app. Besides, “mint” might be related to “minting coins”, which also implies that you’re going to own more and more coins if you’re with Mint, or something of that nature :)

Trello

What I liked right away about Trello, the collaboration tool, is the Husky dog icon. Well, maybe it’s not exactly a Husky, but I like this dog breed, and for some reason I assumed this must be a Husky:

What I liked even more is the message about serving humans. The 500.000 number looks reassuring to a new user.

Trello means business and cares for your time. You don’t linger even for an extra second on their sign-up page:

Speaking of sign-up and login pages, bad captures totally kill good emotions. They make you reload and reload the capture image, and still wouldn’t let you log in. You can live with a login capture, because it’s usually a one-time thing, because apps save your credentials. But anyone who has a capture on their sign-up page is committing a slow suicide:

Back to Trello and to their sign-up process. When I see this:

I have a mixed feeling of approval, empathy, and regret. Here’s why. I can see that these guys are after my actual name, because they’ve put up a message about the full name length. But I know all too well — as someone who processed hundreds, if not thousands, sign-up forms from potential leads— that if a sign-uper prefers to keep their name to themselves, this note would be of no use.

Here’s their account activation message:

I feel reassured and in control.

As Trello welcomes me, I can see that they have taken one step further in serving humans. They want to guide based on how people evaluate their previous experience with collab tools:

Evernote

The most emotionally insecure app that I tried in this research is Evernote. They have a good message on their web-site, but what you see inside the app and during the sign-up is confusing.

First, the elephant logo:

I don’t understand what an elephant has to do with my notes and images put to one place. Maybe it is supposed to be a symbol of everlasting wisdom? But there’s no emotional appeal for the app from my side. Elephants are nice, but they don’t fit in here.

Evernote’s sign-up form is as stern as a 17th century Quaker must have been. Here’s their unhelpful “user name not available” message:

It says nothing to me, accept that the name is not available. No hint on which available mods I can try. I had to mess a bit with figures and underscores until I got this:

Evernote uses machine language. There’s no feeling that you’re welcome here. Sometimes it’s the opposite, sign-up forms can be too off-hand. I don’t want to be tapped on the shoulder like that for any single line:

Back to Evernote. It had even more confusion in store as I tried to make the first note. Here’s the screenshot:

The Set URL context action. Which URL? For what? I typed something in there, but when I tried to access the note later — no success. Then Done and Auto Save on top. Hmm. Why Auto Save when there’s Done there? Which goes first? Should I rely on Auto Save, or should I click Done? Maybe Done is supposed to work when Auto Save is off? Then why keep it there when Auto Save is on? Questions like these rushed through my head, and the app did not offer any answers.

The “Set the note’s location” screen was a bummer. Am I supposed to know the latitude and longitude of my whereabouts in every new location? Maybe they have the auto define location feature somewhere (I can’t imagine that they don’t), but I was not offered this option, and guessing the latitude/longitude is too challenging a task for simply taking a note.

I don’t think I will be using Evernote. It’s too confusing and insecure. Well, they must have more options than taking just notes, as they position themselves as “capture anything- remember everything”, and maybe the other features in Evernote work great, but I don’t care now, as my first emotions about this app were negative.

Ebay

Now let me show you my favourite. What if I forget password? This piece from Ebay is a beauty:

Note a sensible display of case sensitivity. I like words and everything about playing on words, so seeing those characters is a candy for my eye.