How To Design For Optimal User Experiences (and delight users)
Practices adopted from basic human psychology
The other day, I was reading Designing for Emotion, a book on making real connections with users through emotions. The author, Aarron Walter, says that there is no formula for emotional design, only principles of psychology and human nature to guide us [designers].
For crafting digital experiences that resonate with audiences, designers need to have the basic psychological understanding of the people whom they are designing for. Usually, we tend to ignore the basic scientific principles and directly land on working for our desired outcomes. Such as, “How can I get people to sign up for my product?”, “ How can I get people to stay on my website?” and so forth.
While this approach makes us think that we’re saving on time and being diligent, it is, in fact, the contrary. We’ll be stepping on landmines of disengagements and disconnections in the future. Without the knowledge of evolutionary psychology, designing for humans will result in subpar or average experiences that fail to delight our users.
Thus, it is crucial for designers to understand, on a psychological level, why people are doing what they are doing, what motivates them to use our products, stick to our services and recommend them to others. This awareness will allow us to create optimal user experiences for users.
In this article, we will look at a couple of basic approaches in designing optimal experiences for users based on basic psychological principles.
Importance of intrinsic motivation for optimal user experience:
In the mid-1980’s, researchers Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan discovered a theory of motivation known as Self-Determination Theory (SDT). It focuses on the degree to which an individual’s behavior is self-motivated and self-determined. Self-motivated actions were considered to be the results of intrinsic motivation; that is, doing an activity because it is interesting and satisfying. Individuals with strong intrinsic motivation enjoy doing tasks without any external push.
For example, if a biker enjoys riding a bike without worrying about losing weight or achieving any social stature, he is intrinsically motivated to bike riding.
Thus, intrinsic motivation leads to optimal functioning of an individual. Our role as designers is to design experiences and interfaces that enhance the intrinsic motivation of our users to keep using our products or services. We can achieve that by keeping in mind the three innate psychological needs identified by SDT for regulating intrinsic motivation in users. They are:
Competence (the desire to control and master the environment and outcome)
Relatedness (the desire to interact with, be connected to, and experience caring for people and the greater good)
Autonomy (the desire to have a sense of free will when acting on our interests and values)
What if we translated these three innate needs into the needs of our users? It might look something like this:
Ideal Engagement
When designing for optimal user experiences, we need to allow the user to pursue goals as effectively as possible. Our interfaces should be engaging enough to let users follow through on their goals. If the user wants to change his or her goals over time, we need to assist her in achieving the same. But, we should also keep in mind that, in assisting, over-stimuli could bring down productivity. We don’t want our users to leave us because we are too much to handle. Remember Monty Python’s The Funniest Joke In The World?
Designers need to keep the Yerkes–Dodson law in mind while designing for optimal user experience.
“The law dictates that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases.”
One example of ideal engagement is the iA Writer. It has perfected the writing experience for master authors who wanted a distraction-free writing experience. It has got a Focused Mode, where everything fades away except for the sentence you’re writing and allows you to get into the state of flow.
Organized Integration
Users want to feel belonged. According to the psychologist Abraham Maslov, the need for belonging may overcome the physiological and security needs. Tanya Menon, an Assistant Professor at Ohio State University said:
“What’s really fascinating is that any little tiny scrap of commonality, we grab on to those. If you and I are the same height, we just feel comfortable standing there to talk to each other.”
In order to give users what they require, designers need to shape experiences that make them feel connected with their ties (strong or weak) and allow for grouping to take place. As human beings, we would like to experience caring for others and hence, there is an essential need for collaboration between people and gathering valuable feedback.
I can quote Figma as an example. When Figma decided to make a web-based design app, it empowered teams to communicate and build designs faster together from any device in the world. It’s platform-independency, the Multiplayer feature and easy File Sharing accelerated simultaneous editing and feedback sharing. Figma’s special feature — Developer Handoff has brought greater good will into this competitive work culture by easing the workload of fellow colleagues.
Figma has also garnered the attention of up and coming UI developers and established for itself a community following that will show a strong loyalty towards it in the future.
Authentic Personality
The way we behave over time is manifested in our personality. We can understand that our personality is our individual way of using our capacity to live a life that we desire. To bond with our users, we need to design experiences that relate to their personalities. Only then, do they see similarities and find our products attractive and desirable.
Thus, it is important to remember that products are to be treated as people too. Users attribute personality traits to products and they are more likely to use our products if they feel better about it.
For example, why do we feel strongly connected to Mailchimp over tens of other email marketing software? It is because of the emotional association we have with the brand. The fun voice, its comfortable visual design, and Freddie Von Chimpenheimer IV’s empathy are very much relatable to our personalities.
Another example of a product that captured our trust with its unique personality is Dropbox Paper. We were well aware of the utility of Dropbox and how the brand evolved over the years. We were told their story from time to time.
With Dropbox Paper, users were assured that the experience was going to be authentic to its original brand.
With their new rebranding, Dropbox’s mission to bringing ideas together was felt succinctly within Dropbox Paper. Their handmade style of illustration, clean interface, and a sharp typography speaks to our creative energy. This entire experience encourages users to put down their ideas into blank canvases. There’s also a sense of autonomy when Dropbox Paper allows users to create their own templates and make their own doc designs.
If you’re working on creating a personality for your website, here is a cool resource compiled by Aarron Walter that tells you what to include in your design persona.
How internalizing external motives help achieve optimal user experience:
Coming back to SDT, the study additionally informs us that extrinsic motivation can become intrinsic if we attempt at internalizing the external motives as our personal values. For example, a child seeing the value and importance of doing her school assignment has internalized her external motives as her own.
As designers, this means that we need not always rely solely on our user’s intrinsic motivation to stick to our products. Thank god, right? Now, we know that we have the power to assist users in understanding the value of our products without having them realize those right away.
How do we make this happen? Through encouraging conversations or virtual rewards. (It is found that using monetary rewards to increase intrinsic motivation has been counterproductive compared to verbal praise.)
Transplant Hero is an app that has strengthened users’ intrinsic motivation of staying on their medication schedule (as they are transplant patients) by giving them rewards for each successful attempt.
Another example would be Interaction-design.org, which grades learners around the world on each of their courses and displays their ranking on top in order to motivate them to finish their courses.
In conclusion, when designing for optimal user experiences:
- designers need to strive a balance of user’s basic psychological needs. Without balance, it is difficult to design for optimal user experiences. Think of a bulky sales software that has got competence but lack in personality and relatedness. Such products will fail to motivate us in time.
- designers should consistently listen to users and modify their products’ goals and personalities if need be. Let’s try to make products that are in line with our user’s needs at every step of the way.
- we need to understand the motivation behind our user’s actions. This knowledge will help us in designing user experiences that transcends beyond digital interfaces and making a real emotional connection with our beloved users.
In following the above practices, we will be well on our way to craft experiences that are optimal and enjoyable.
Thank you for reading so far! If you like this article, you know what to do. :) Much love. ❤
