Babies create bonds with their parents through an interesting feedback loop. When they cry their parents respond by soothing them, which releases calming neurotransmitters in their brains. As this cycle repeats, the baby begins to trust that their parents will respond when they need them.
A similar feedback loop happens in interface design. Positive emotional stimuli can build a sense of trust and engagement with your users. People will forgive your site or application’s shortcomings, follow your lead, and sing your praises if you reward them with positive emotion.
Aral Balkan’s Twitter iPhone app – Feathers – deftly combines usability and emotional design to create a pleasurable user experience. As you type a tweet, a cute birdy mascot starts to fill with color to indicate how many characters you have left of the 140 maximum (figure 6). If you exceed 140 characters, the bird changes red to indicate your error (figure 7). While satisfying a basic usability heuristic to provide feedback about system status, Balkan has also created an interaction with which his audience can fall in love.
“I really *LOVE* the singing bird when you send a tweet. Twitter is fun all of a sudden!” – @thetalldesigner
Figure 6: As you type a tweet into Feathers for iPhone, the mascot fills to give feedback on message length.
“Confession: sometimes I make too long Feathers-tweets just to watch the bird turn red.” – @evbjone
Figure 7: If your tweet is too long, the Feathers bird turns red giving feedback in a fun way.
The feathers bird creates a powerful connection with users because it’s a point of empathy. As @thetalldesigner states above, he doesn’t just like this app, he loves it. It’s not an application that’s providing feedback, it’s a fun little friend with personality, and personality is the platform for human emotion.
“Before your application can create an emotional relationship with the user it must get the basics right. The emotional relationship, the delight, is what you layer on top of this base usability and technical competency.” – Aral Balkan, designer/developer of Feathers
TapBots are following similar principles to create wildly successful utility apps that track your weight and do simple unit conversion. That’s no small feat. How do you get excited about tracking your weight loss (or gain)? The answer—create points of emotional connection.
“We did want our users to have an emotional connection to our apps. Most people don’t have a love/joy for software like geeks do.” – Mark Jardine, TapBots Designer
Figure 8: TapBots apps use personification to create a cute robot personality that almost seems human.
The movie Wall-e was the inspiration for Weightbot and Convertbot.
“Our concept for the first 2 apps was selling our apps as if they were physical robots. That’s why the icons resemble the interface. We also gave the icons eyes to humanize them a bit. But we use this idea as a selling point and not to distract the user in the actual app. We want our apps to be used seriously, but also give the sense that they are more than just a piece of software.” – Mark Jardine, TapBots Designer
It comes as no surprise, with the great care and attention Jardine has put into the relationship Tapbots have to the people that use them, that the feedback they’ve received confirms the emotional connection they sought to create.
“ I adore the way their apps look and sound.” – John Gruber, Daringfireball.net
The Risk of Emotion
As is true in real life, showing emotion in design has real risk. Some people won’t get it. Some people will even hate it. But that’s okay. Emotional response to your design is far better than indifference.
Showing personality in your app, website, or brand can be a very powerful way for your audience to identify and empathize with you. People want to connect with real people and too often we forget that businesses are just collections of people. So why not let that shine through?
Source: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/emotional-interface-design-the-gateway-to-passionate-users/
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