The information design rule I’m capturing today is critical: design for how people feel. Even in business and professional settings, it’s important we get in touch with our feelings. Or, more importantly, it’s important we understand how our audiences’ feelings will be affected by what we create.
It’s not uncommon to think of business, professional, and scientific documents as static and boring. Traditionally, workplace communications earned that reputation because most instruction in the field (including college lectures and textbooks) focused more on the formulaic aspects of communication—formatting, organizational structure, grammar and mechanics, process, project management, and so forth. Even in chapters and lectures that covered design, the focus tended to be more on usability. Emotion was rarely part of the communication equation.
But cognitive and behavioral scientists have shifted the way we think about emotion—it underlies just about everything else. When we have emotional reactions, we engage better, learn better, and remember better. World-renown cognitive scientist and human-computer interaction specialist Donald Norman put it simply: “Usually you react to a situation emotionally before you react to it cognitively.”
If we can take that statement to be true (and there are stockpiles of research to back it up), then what does that say for designing information? It means we need to be conscious of how people will feel when they see and read it. We need to design information to be aesthetically pleasing, easy to follow, adapted to our audiences’ needs and wants, and linguistically rich. Basically, we need to making enjoyable to look at an read. If not, our audiences will just just turn away. This is especially true in the Information Age, where they’re always swimming in a deluge of words, images, and data. If information doesn’t speak to their soul in some way (perhaps that’s a bit dramatic, but I like how it sounds 🙂 ), they’ll probably just tune out.
So how do we design information to be emotionally charged? I can’t cover all the ways in this article, but the perfect place to begin thinking about emotional design is with the three ways Donald Norman tells us people react to information: viscerally, behaviorally, and reflectively.
Visceral Design
To design for visceral reactions means to design so that people will have an immediate, impulsive, and almost instinctual reaction. If we’re conscious of what the visceral reaction might be, we can plan to help our readers “feel” a certain way about our information before they even begin reading or engaging with it. Note that people in the 21st century have a great deal of experience with design—even if they’re not real conscious of it—and they will have visceral reactions to colors, fonts, and layouts that immediately strike them as “ugly,” “unprofessional,” “sexy,” “sleek,” “exciting,” “important,” or any other descriptor. What can you do make something visually appealing, attractive, and, therefore, more likely to be meaningful to your reader? In other words, what can you do to improve your audience’s visceral reactions to your information?
Behavioral Design
Designing for behavioral reactions means that we are causing people to physically interact with and cognitively process information in ways we intend. Behavioral reactions to designs happen mostly subconsciously, but they are learned and improved over time. When people see a door handle, for example, they feel compelled to pull rather than push because experience has told them that an outward handle means the door will pull towards them. Their behavior (pulling the door rather than pushing) is affected because of the design of the handle (if designers want to get a person to push a door, they shouldn’t put a handle, but a flat metal plate). People using a website may subconsciously scroll through a page or click on blue underlined text because they have learned the visual cues that function as scrolling and hyperlinking. Any time we design information, people will react to it based on how their experience has trained them. Consider what people will subconsciously assume is a link, a button, a fillable text field, or a caption; is what you are creating obvious and easy to use and does it meet their expectations? If it does, they will feel better about it. If it doesn’t, they’ll likely have negative reactions to the information, even if the content is solid.
Reflective Design
Designing for reflective reactions means the message actually resonates with people, beyond just subconscious, behavioral and visceral emotions. Reflective reactions to information refer to when people think about and respond to what they just did or saw. If people are attracted to a design (visceral) and they use it in ways that they expect or that are enjoyable (behavioral), they are likely to reflect on the experience as being “simple” or “fun” or “worthwhile.” But if what they experience doesn’t meet their expectations, their reflection may drum up emotions like “confusing,” “dull,” or “frustrating.” Note that every time someone interacts with your information, they most likely have a reflective moment, even if incredibly brief. If they delete your email before reading it, it’s likely because they reflected on certain properties of it that said, “not important.”