When things are instantly understandable, the user feels gratified. User-friendliness is also a feature of visceral design. The wow factor works at the visceral level. A designer needs to know what is emotionally appealing to their target audience, what they consider beautiful. Beautiful things are perceived intuitively. Visceral design appeals to the user’s intuition. Web designers who don’t know their users create wrong contact points or none at all. Our task is to achieve emotional contact through visuals and microinteractions on every level. reflexive - conscious attitude to the product, “trying it on” (picturing yourself as the owner), general impression of the product. behavioral - pleasure of user experience visceral - appearance, perception at first glance The farther from the center and the less vivid the color is, the less intensive the emotions. You can use Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions as a guide to choose the primary color. Now we know where we’re headed.Ĭolor triggers an immediate, intuitive emotional response, which is why it is so important to choose the right one. This is the “mental image” of our future design. You’ll need some real customer reviews with pictures, maybe a calendar. What works in this case is a subdued blue or green color palette and a couple of contrasting fonts. There’s no need to nudge them along with vivid design and distract them from the business at hand: all these people need is concentration, a plain working background, and no frills. Say our target customers are men aged between 25 and 65, mostly conservative, cautious, organized, occasionally impulsive. Let’s take the brokerage website as an example. Now let’s take a look at our list and come up with a mental image rather than a fully-fledged design. We already know who our users are and what they should feel when they interact with our product. This is about the general design concept. This is where you can use Norman’s method, described below. Check the competitors’ websites, try to analyze the design with an eye to emotions and user contact points. For example, in designing the abovementioned brokerage website you can have reliability, calm, trust, a relaxing general impression but focus on important details.īut what to do if the customer isn’t sure what emotions they need? Study the subject carefully, immerse yourself in it. All you need now is to add some emotions - but which exactly?Ī good idea is to write a list. Esthetically pleasing, functional, user-friendly - obviously, your design is already all that. To be sure, excitement is always a must for any design. You need to have a clear understanding of the emotions you want to appeal to. Web Design With the Focus on the Target Audience What is emotionally appealing to this particular target group? What kind of design works for them? Buyer persona templates are very useful, e.g. Use buyer personas to better understand their needs and visual preferences. You need to picture them as if they were your friends and family. Learn as much as you can about your users. You can’t trigger an emotional response if you don’t know who you’re dealing with. The emo-embryo will grow and develop throughout the work and discussion process, and by the time you get to creating the design it will have an easy birth. Even if the idea is in its embryonic stage. The emotions you want your design to broadcast have to be decided upon at the very beginning. No emotional design can be efficient without market analysis, without an understanding the project’s goals and objectives, without knowing your audience and user profiles. If you’re looking to create a particular flavor, you’ll prepare the ingredients in advance, won’t you? You can change the color palette in the process, but if you need animation or gamification to trigger an emotional response, it’s something you must consider at the outset.Įmotional design is born at the design concept stage based on market research. Looking at this diagram, it’s tempting to think that first you need to take care of functionality, followed by reliability and usability, and then create the icing on the cake by making the design emotional. But humans have no fundamental need for design no one’s going to die after seeing an ugly, barely functioning website. What is wrong with it? It’s an equivalent of Maslow’s pyramid for design.

Plutchik's wheel of emotions triads