Emotional connections are two-way streets. Evoking real and meaningful emotion from our customers requires that we, as designers, bring real and meaningful emotion to the table too.
I work for Intuit, where making emotional connections with our customers is a top priority. In an earlier article, I talked about the need to establish a deeper emotional connection to create Magical and Meaningful experiences. Understanding what delight feels like and the supporting principles to design for delight is a big step forward, but it’s not enough. Getting Magic and Meaning from our hearts into our customers’ hands means changing the way we work, the way we share ideas, and the way we define success. That type of change requires bravery.
Three Acts of Bravery to Increase Emotion for Customers
1.) Protect the soul of your design. Good design makes us feel. We know good design when we see it and we’ve all seen great design concept get whittled down and diluted through multiple review cycles and the development process. Maintaining the essence of what makes a concept great is hard work, whether in a company the size of Intuit — with 8,000 employees around the world — or a small company with only a few employees. It requires dogged persistence and dedication to the design. It’s tiring and you have to put yourself on the line. You have to work to make believers out of your stakeholders and development partners so they can feel what you want the customer to feel.
Protecting the soul of the design means designing not just for customers, but also for your internal audience. Designing for the way they experience your design concept makes it that much easier for you to get that concept into your customer’s hands. For us, this has meant a serious commitment to prototyping. A prototype conveys a complete experience and can evoke the emotions and reactions of the complete experience.
A prototype speaks for itself and doesn’t break down into component parts — it can be experienced as a whole. By contrast, mock-ups in PowerPoint, communicate elements of experience on distinct pages. It’s much easier for reviewers to carve up an experience that’s given to them in pieces. It’s also easier for reviewers to apply preconceived notions of the experience to a mock-up since it relies on the communication skills of the designer rather than the design of the experience. This scenario can quickly lead to compromised designs and unnecessary reworking of concepts. The value of prototyping isn’t new, but prototyping takes time, and we’ve learned the extra time up-front saves significant time downstream. The prototypes let us share complete experiences with customers for feedback, generate excitement — and expectations — in leaders, and enable us to work out potential production issues for the development team. That makes the design concept hard to push back on, keeping its soul intact and expediting the process.
Prototyping isn’t the only way to be deliberate about designing experiences for internal audiences. Mike Kruzeniski is currently the Design Lead at Twitter, but when he was UX Creative Director for the Entertainment Experience Group at Microsoft, he spearheaded a prioritization system that united the design and development teams. A simple change to their internal prioritization system engaged their development partners in the design concepts in a more meaningful way and kept the soul of their designs alive. See his talk “Poetry & Polemics in Creating Experience” to see how replacing numbers (P0, P1, P2, P3) with words (soul, heart, body) brought emotion into the conversation and rooted both teams in what actually mattered to the customer.
For O’Grady’s remaining two tips about bravery’s worthwhile payoff, go here.
Amanda O’Grady is a design strategist at Intuit where she brings emotion into the design and development process to deliver product experiences that feel magical and meaningful. Her job is to make messy problems simple. By embedding with product teams she ensures each program goes beyond a clear story and makes a tangible impact on the product. This is the second of a three-part series, which was written by O’Grady and previously published in UX Magazine, on designing to evoke emotion.