Meeting a User's Emotional Needs

Tangible Needs

Before we can talk about emotional needs, we need to lay a bit of a foundation. We’ll do that by talking about tangible needs.

A tangible need is what you would normally hear associated with user-centered design. These are usually pretty straightforward and, well, tangible. They’re things like:

• Finding information
• Getting a task done
• Getting help
• Buying a product or service

These needs are where it seems the majority of effort is placed, and probably rightly so. If you had a hierarchy of needs these would form the base. They are essential to a good user experience and ultimately have a large and lasting effect on a users emotional needs.

Emotional Needs

It may seem as if tangible needs are more important that emotional needs. This isn’t always the case. It could very well turn out, based on you business goals, that emotional needs are more important.

Emotional needs are much, “fuzzier”, and harder to nail down. As well they can vary greatly from site to site. In general these needs are the things that will leave a user feeling extra satisfied with their experience, or not. They can be things such as:

• Being entertained
• A feeling of belonging
• Being intellectually stimulated
• Feeling appreciated
• Feeling safe and secure

See what I mean? They’re a bit vague. However, don’t let that fool you. These needs can be very important, especially when your business needs are marketing and branding focused. Satisfying these needs could mean success or failure of your online efforts.

Tangible vs. Emotional?

Often it seems that the basic, tangible needs of a user are pitted against a users emotional needs. This is usually due to the fact that, whether we like it or not, business goals will almost always win a shoving match with user goals.

As usual, it depends on those goals as well as the audience for the site. To make matters even more complicated, you could have mulitple audiences, or conflicting needs within an audience group. I supposed there could be cases where all of these things naturally go together. If you’re working on one of these projects—lucky you!

I recently read a quote over at UIE, in an article on Branding and Usability:

(I don’t know who wrote it or when, as that information isn’t with the article. Hello?)

Designers have a choice: build a site that uses direct-experience branding or build one that uses indirect-message branding. It’s theoretically possible to develop a site that does both, but we’ve never seen that done successful.

It’s a good article, with some solid points, but I’ve got a problem with that last sentence. What the author means by mixing direct-experience and indirect-message branding boils down to function and form basically. They’re saying you can’t meet a users emotional needs with messaging, graphics, etc and build a functional pleasing user experience at the same time. At least this is how I interpreted it.

To be quite frank, I think that’s total bullshit.

The ultimate goal?

There is no such thing as a perfect Web experience, but that doesn’t mean we can’t set lofty goals. Sure we’ll never be able to please everyone, or even a really high percentage, that is a limitation of the medium. But we can do our best to blend business and user goals to provide the best experience possible. One that meets both a users tangible and emotional needs and meets the goals of the business—whatever those may be—in the process.

If you try hard enough, make a strong effort to understand a users needs (all of them) and tie those needs to your business goals you will be able to form a strong foundation to build upon. Sure, with many sites, those business goals are going to match up with those fussy emotional needs, and there are times when emotional needs are going to trump tangible needs, it’s a fact of business.

However I think if the right processes are in place and the proper channels of communication (between design and marketing, the users and the business) are open these needs and goals can be made to work in concert for the best possible user experience. One that satisfies all a user’s needs and meets those business goals as well.

How to do it

In my mind the theory is simple. To meet a users emotional needs you need to start by meeting a users tangible needs. Form follows function, and all that. Make a site that works well, is built upon a solid information architecture and has been designed with the user in mind. A users tangible needs must be met in order to meet their emotional needs.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean these tangible needs have to be met first as far as your design process goes. I think it’s important to try and identify and meet those emotional needs at the same time if possible. Many user-centered Web processes begin by tying to tackle tangible needs first, and wait to address emotional need after those tangible needs are taken care of.

This may be a mistake. It’s important to address things like messaging, content and brand early enough in the process that they can be thoroughly woven in. It’s ok to have two streams going, just make sure they cross every once in awhile and communicate with each other.

As with more traditional approaches to user-centered design, testing and research is essential. I think it can be very beneficial to try and tease out these emotional goals, as well as validate them, throughout the process.

Work them into personas, address them in wireframes, and brainstorm ideas to meet them before you apply visual form to your designs. As well things like bi-polar emotional response testing can provide you with some useful infomation.

User Experience is made of many things

In closing I’ll point you in the direction of Peter Morville’s User Experience honeycomb and its “Facets of the User Experience.” You’ll note it’s made up of a mix of tangible and emotional needs.

I like this model quite a bit and think it’s a great way to visualize and talk about all the varied needs that go into a great user experience. If you focus too much on one need the others suffer. Take one away and it’s just not right somehow.

The goal should be to take care as many of those needs as possible. Do that and you’ll probably be meeting you’re business goals as well and everyone involved will be happy and proud to celebrate in that success.