As a user experience designer, learning how to prevent products from generating negative emotions, you will want to arouse users' positive emotions and enjoy products. This article will teach you how to reduce friction and negative emotions in your experience.
How does friction in experience hinder decision-making and lead to negative emotions?
Since video and DVD were replaced by Netflix, do you have too many choices and don't know which one to watch? When the CD player is replaced by an mp3 player that can store 40,000 songs, such as an Apple iPod, will you not know what to cut the next song, or will it be difficult to continue listening and have fun? Many times a song is changed without listening to it?
A lot of research shows that too many choices can actually make people lose motivation. A popular study shows, "If choice makes people lose motivation: Will a person yearn for too many beautiful things?" Psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Leper found that when people choose too many things, they may not be able to make a decision. If they make a decision, they are usually dissatisfied with their choice.
Netflix is an example of overwhelming choice on the screen, and a large number of choices will make users hesitate and depressed.
As a designer, you don't want your users to have negative emotions, as the famous cognitive scientist Don Norman said in his paper on design and emotions: "Negative emotions will affect you to complete simple tasks, while positive emotions will make it easier for you to complete difficult tasks."
Too many choices hinder users' decision-making and produce depressed negative emotions. If you want users to like your product, try to help them make a decision. Help users understand the concepts and information you want to convey, make it easier for them to browse the designed feed, and direct users' eyes to the place you designed.
Instead, it can guide the positive emotions of users when designing the experience. Alice Isen, a professor of psychology and marketing at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies to investigate how positive emotions such as happiness and interest affect decision-making. In a research summary, Alice Isen and Barbara Means asked users to choose between six hypothetical cars. They found that consumers with positive emotions make more efficient decisions. This has an impact on the design of the website. In e-commerce, enterprises must consider the telephone cost of users when making decisions.
Negative experience of user interface
Throughout the user experience, you can see various areas that evoke emotions. However, first of all, we should learn how to identify the interface parts that may lead to negative emotions and eliminate or repair these problems. Let's look at some examples:
Avoid direct friction between user and interface.
User processes can be interrupted in many ways, which causes friction between users and interfaces. E-commerce forces users to register accounts and provide mailboxes to buy products, which is an example. In the real world, people can go to stores to buy products without providing email addresses or detailed personal information. Why do users bother to create an account on the website? Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich's Ten Guides to User Interface point out that the system we design should match the real world. So don't ask too many users. Perhaps from the marketing point of view, it is your idea to collect as many emails as possible, but as a designer, your job is to think from the user's point of view and defend the user.
When users decide to shop in Topshop, they will be guided to register or log in to the interface. This step will not interfere with the user's purchase process, leading to the user's depression or irritability, or even leaving. Creating an account for your users can make better sales and benefit users.
Avoid using terminology.
Designers should not assume that users will understand certain terms. If possible, try to avoid using terms such as NFC ready, quad-band or signal enhancement. Use concise language that users can understand, and be conscious when choosing the language to communicate with users. Anger and depression are one of the factors that lead to negative effects when using terms. When introducing terms to users, users may complicate simple tasks and make decision-making more difficult. Users may give up their current tasks and not buy products online, which is the worst case.
Avoid bad information architecture
Chaos navigation has always been the most chaotic module in UI, and the content hierarchy itself has not been considered. Make sure that the site map is created through systematic thinking and card classification. In addition, please remember that search results come from the ranking of various factors, and what attracts users is the content and content structure, whether it is a large search engine or an e-commerce website.
Three methods to prevent negative emotions in products
By introducing the user into a "streaming" state, the friction between the user and the interface is reduced. Flow is a state of complete immersion when a person is engaged in activities. Immersion usually brings great concentration and devotion to activities. Therefore, pop-up advertisements and forced login should be avoided. But as a user experience designer, your job is to defend users, fight for their interests, and explain to the team how much the user experience will be improved if you remove every distraction.
Express the purpose by predicting the needs of users. Think clearly about every contact point of the user, put yourself in the user's shoes and think about every interaction from the user's point of view. There are many ways to prove that you are thinking about how users handle the visual elements and interactions you provide. You know your target audience is the general public, so avoid using terminology. If you expect users to need extra help and guidance, provide an area for asking for help. Ensure that the visual experience can provide good contrast. You know, a beautiful UI is the key to attracting people's attention, and a good user experience can usually keep users' attention when you stand at every interaction point.
Building a good information structure, whether your products are marketing websites, systems or mobile applications, is very important. Information structure is the structural basis of any design. Without it, your users can't find what they want, they will become depressed and you will lose opportunities. You can achieve this through systematic thinking.
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Design should stimulate users' positive emotions, happiness and pleasure, and reduce negative emotions, anger and frustration. Bad emotions will make it more difficult for users to handle simple tasks, while positive emotions will make it easier for users to complete difficult tasks. Stimulate positive emotions, reduce friction and pay attention to effective information structure through design.