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“The latest breakthroughs in brain research suggest that people make emotional decisions, which they later rationalize.”

• The left hemisphere is the center of linear thinking such as language, logic, and mathematics.
• The right hemisphere is the center of conceptual thoughts such as art, music, creativity, and inspiration.

“The brain can also be categorized into three distinct parts” (…):

• “The new brain thinks. It processes rational data.”
• “The middle brain feels. It processes emotions and gut feelings.”
• “The old brain decides. It takes into account the input from the other two.”

“There is a strong emotional component to how products are designed and put to use” (…):

• “Visceral design concerns itself with appearances”.
• “Behavioral design has to do with pleasure and effectiveness to use.”
• “Reflective design considers rationalization and intellectualization of a product.”

“Neuromarketing” by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin.

“Emotional Design” by Donald Norman.

Last year, I started a series of posts dealing with dilemmas often faced by innovators. Earlier this month I mentioned that innovating takes hard work. I would now like to add that it also takes understanding your customers thought process, as well as how emotions play a key role in decision making.

Going back to the time I was an industrial design student in Barcelona, my class was presented with well known frameworks which were meant to guide us through the innovation and product design process. Some professors would start with clear design oversimplifications such as:

• “form follows function.”

Some other would deliver more complex value propositions involving the bundling of:

• usability: the product’s features can be easily understood, the product works well and is user friendly.
• economics: perceived value, willingness to pay, and the value chain involves a sustainable business model.
• culture: the product is in tune with a given society’s taste, being embraced by a group of consumers, “think locally.”

Further considerations would involve marketing input on specific product requirements targeting:

• the mass market delivering economies of scale
• very specific market segments and product differentiation
• customization and market niches involving premium features
  

Nonetheless, in a postmodernist world, my recollection is that most students dreamed about professional design carriers modeled after fashionable product designers, Philippe Stark being an example. Some design icons appeared to have been blessed with some rare design instinct and a compelling disregard for conventional frameworks.

Then, when studying human factors engineering, I was exposed to a product requirements template which asked for defining profiles depicting fictional personas representing users. These would capture the actual diversity of users interacting with the product. We would have to specify whether they were:

• primary users: target users
• secondary users: product support, maintenance staff, etc.
• lead-users: power users able to hack, tweak and customize the product
• occasional users: casual, lightweight usage
• unintended users: adjacent and unsuspected use cases
• influencers: role models, fashion, groupthink / peer pressure, consultants, etc.
• decision makers: agents involved in purchasing decisions, budget holders, etc.
• antagonists: product substitutes, vandal user behavior, etc.

This kind of an analysis helped us to map out and to understand interactions across:

• common features which where of value to all of them
• the ones happened to be persona specific
• spotting those which would involve conflicts of interest across user types
  

The thought process also involved the development of use cases considering the product’s changing context:

• physical location: surroundings, environment, changes involving time of day, etc.
• lifecycle: manufacturing, shipping, display, storage, maintenance, retirement, etc.

Basically, all of these factors were thought out as part of systems engineering approach to consumer product design. Moreover, we were asked to consider three design aspects of our human nature:

• physical: the suitability of the actual form factor.
• psychological: the interface’s user friendliness and the user’s learning curve.
• sociological: the users’ behavior and context, such his/her role in his/her social network and culture.

Amazingly enough, many designers I worked with rarely look at product roadmapping, meaning that they would not spend enough time figuring out how products would evolve through successive releases and how that related to the product’s actual design:

• keeping or dropping features
• improving upon existing features
• enabling features driven by adjacent and unsuspected use cases
• adding new features

As a result cramming a lot of features into first product releases and mission creep have become well known innovation pitfalls. This often signals that the designer did not know the difference between core and value added features. As software has become ubiquitous and present in day to day products,  roadmapping also requires looking into the product’s evolution as far as:

• performance
• capacity
• modularity
• energy efficiency
• dependencies
• integration
• maintenance
• upgradability
• scalability
• replacement
• retirement
• recyclability

Interestingly enough, the above items often yield use cases plagued with hidden usability issues, which could have been otherwise avoided should the designer had looked at the product’s roadmap. I now need to go back to the two quotes I started this post with as studying emotions is part of the design process. For instance, here is another interesting one from Donald Norman:

“Beyond the design of an object, there is a personal component as well, one that no designer or manufacturer can provide. The objects in our lives are more than material possessions.”

“We take pride in them, not necessarily because we are showing off our wealth of status, but because of the meaning they bring to our lives (…) a favorite object is a symbol, setting up a positive frame of mind, a reminder of pleasant memories, or sometimes an expression of one’s self.”

So the rationale behind emotional design is about acknowledging that our thought process involves instincts and acquired behaviors (whether as users or designers) which shape our perceptions and both comfort and risk taking levels, thus influencing the overall decision making process. Note that even a single individual can make conflicting decisions based on his/her context and condition: many people tend to make rush decisions when they are tired and some cannot make the most of their skills under pressure. One’s emotional state matters.

This degree of variability and diversity is what makes us human. Understanding that is key to innovating and can help explain why some technologies fail to realize the kind of adoption levels that would justify investing in them. Additionally, our decisions can also be subject to selective memory, human error and misleading logical fallacies, which I would like to write about in my next post. In the meantime, please let me know your comments. Thanks.

Credits: the above picture was found on “The Situacionist“

J. de Francisco
Barcelona, 16 February 08

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