Designing for stressed out users | Part 2

A framework to identify and reduce stress behaviours

[If you’ve not read it, you might want to start here — Designing for stressed out users | Part 1: What is stress and why does it matter]

In Part 1 of this piece on designing experiences for stressed-out users, we defined stress and its impact on our users, and their perceptions of our digital experiences.

Now, I’m going to cover the types of behaviour we might see and how we can mitigate or reduce this.

Part 2

1. What are stress behaviours?
2. How can we mitigate stress through design? (including a framework I created for this purpose)

1. What are stress behaviours?

I previously mentioned that users who find experiences stressful can associate your product with negative emotions, and/or leave your app or website and go elsewhere.

But that’s not all.

There are a number of fascinating behaviours that HCI boffins have found that are associated with stress response to digital products. (Feel free to read the entire chapter on it in HCI Fundamentals or keep reading this summary)

These include:

• Repeated searching — If a user doesnt have confidence in your search results, they will keep going. If this is combined with a temporary lack of confidence in themselves, then this it is less likely any search result will satisfice.
• Repeating similar actions — If you’re working on an eCommerce site, you may see repeated add/remove basket behaviour, if it’s insurance or credit quotes, there will be multiple searches using different information variants. For the geeks, this is called a maladaptive cycle.
• Incomplete journeys — this is a given, but users will not only bounce from your site, they’ll come back.. and bounce again. This might be a particular blocker in your flow, but if there is no obvious visual impediment, it might be that they have reached critical cognitive…