Principles of Emotional Design
How to design emotionally compelling, visceral product experiences
To preface, at Intuit we make financial products for consumers and small businesses. Some that you may have heard of include Quickbooks, Quicken, Mint.com and TurboTax. At Intuit we have a culture of putting the customer first, and it comes through in our mission, which is to improve our customers’ financial lives so profoundly…they can’t imagine going back to the old way.
In order to ground you in where Intuit has been and how we’ve come to design emotional experiences, let’s start with a story — the story of design at Intuit. We’ll start the story in 1993.
1993 — TurboTax simplified tax prep
Over 20 years ago, Intuit bought Chipsoft, the creator of TurboTax. TurboTax was not innovative in that it slapped the IRS 1040 form on the computer screen, it was innovative in that it abstracted the 1040 form into a series of interview-style questions that are much simpler for the user to answer. Then, in the background, TurboTax takes the answers to those questions, plugs them into the 1040 form, and sends it off to the IRS.
Clearly this provides great value to our customers: taxes are something everyone has to do and it makes them much easier. Now, benefit and ease of use alone allowed us to surface to the top as the leading do-it-yourself tax-preparation software on the market.
But we soon began to realize that solving for ease and benefit is simply table-stakes in an era of beautifully designed, connected experiences.
2007 — A turning point
Fast-forward to 2007 and “we realized that we were no longer as proud of the experiences we were creating — that in many cases we were no longer any better than our competitors” (Kaaren Hanson, Former VP of Design & Innovation, https://vimeo.com/90153387). And this was for many external an internal reasons. Externally, Apple was becoming a design powerhouse with the iPod and then the iPhone in 2007. They were pushing the envelope in terms of design were elevating customer expectations for how products should look and feel. We weren’t keeping up. Internally, we had grown from a small startup to a huge corporation, and while we had always had a customer-first culture it was one thing that was hard to scale as we grew. In some ways we lost sight of what was most important — our customers and delivering benefit to them through amazing product experiences.
It was even maybe said that “Intuit is the most well run, no growth company in the Valley.” I say maybe because I’m not sure if this is a real quote. I couldn’t find a source, but regardless, this was representative of Intuit at the time.
We hypothesized that the next big opportunity for web services would be tapping into human emotion to elevate products from those that are tolerated to those that inspire delight. And so we figured delight would be the key to future success.
It was at this point in 2007 that we launched an initiative called “Design for Delight” (D4D), with the ultimate goal of making Intuit a design-driven company. We put all our eggs in this basket; we were either going to design delightful experiences or we were going to go under.
“Design for delight is our number one weapon in attaining growth, and there is no number two.”
-Scott Cook, Founder of Intuit
So what is the D4D framework? It’s best described using three visualizations (Figures 1–3 above).
Figure 1 describes what problems we solve and in what areas we innovate. We start by finding an important customer, or human problem. We then ask ourselves: is this is a problem that we and/or our partners can solve? And the final piece is can we create a solution with durable advantage, meaning are we in a position to solve the problem in a way that nobody else can solve it.
Figure 2 illustrates the three core principles for how we design delightful experiences. It starts by cultivating deep customer empathy which means knowing your customer better than they know themselves. It is proven that observing customer pain leads to breakthrough innovation, and this can’t be done from behind your desk. Meet your customers where they are and observe them in order to see them from a different perspective. This practice at Intuit is called “Follow me home”. Using the insights from your customers you can then go broad to go narrow. This comes from two truths: (1) to have one good idea, you have to have a lot, and (2) your first idea is likely not your best. The process uses divergent and convergent thinking to make choices and then decisions which almost always lead to great ideas. Once you have a great idea, it is time for rapid experiments with customers. We run tests either in the field or in the lab, early and often with customers to get real observations and feedback.
And it wouldn’t be a proper emotional design framework without a Maslow-style pyramid. Figure 3 depicts a hierarchy of delight. Creating benefit that the user cares about is foundational to any product. Without benefit we simply don’t have a product. Beyond benefit, ease of use used to differentiate a good product from a great product. Nowadays basic usability is table-stakes. If a product is not easy to use, people will not use it. So what differentiates products now? Delight. And creating delightful product experiences hinges on invoking a positive emotion.
“Usable = Edible”
I’ll always love Aarron Walter’s product design/cooking analogy. In his book “Emotional Design” Aarron says interacting with usable products is comparable to eating food for it’s nutritional value. It’ll do, but there’s nothing enjoyable about it. Really good chefs strive to create multi-sensory, visceral experiences with their food. We should also strive, as designers to design emotionally engaging, delightful experiences. Usability is simply not enough anymore.
2013 — XD Forum, our internal design conference
Fast-forward to 2013 and our CEO, Brad Smith, attended our internal design conference, called XD Forum, to share a few words. He re-iterated his usual point that Intuit will be a design-driven company by 2020.
Hugh Macdonald, a Design Strategist and the Design Lead of the end-to-end TurboTax product stood up and said “Design is at the table and leading product vision today. Why do we have to wait until 2020? What is going to change between now and then?” Brad paused, thinking for a moment and then replied “You know what, Hugh? You’re right. Intuit is a design-driven company and we strive to get better every day.”
But it is now 8 years out from identifying that we need to design delightful experiences, and we still don’t have a great idea of what that means. Show me an experience and ask me if it’s delightful or not: no problem. On the other hand, ask me to design a delightful, emotional experience: paralysis. It’s clearly an easy thing to talk about and another thing entirely to do.
So, here is my attempt to synthesize what we’ve learned over the last couple years into relevant and actionable principles with examples along the way. These principles are a combination of research on the topic of emotional design and simply putting to words how we design emotionally engaging products at Intuit.
Principle #1: Identify “own-able moments”
At TurboTax we have coined the term “own-able moments”. We define these as moments in the experience where we know or can identify a change or escalation in emotion, either good or bad.
What we’re not talking about are “easter eggs”. In Zappos’ mobile app when you shake the phone, kittens fall from the top of the screen. Is this delightful? Maybe if you like cats. What an easter egg is is a sprinkling of fun throughout the experience, it’s not identifying a critical, emotional point and curating that experience. Easter eggs certainly have their place, but we’re talking about tapping into moments that are already emotional for our customers and designing experiences with that in mind.
An example of an own-able moment within TurboTax is that of clicking transmit to file your taxes. First of all, we know that taxes aren’t fun, they’re a chore. And up until this point, the user might have gone through hours of tax prep drudgery. It’s also a very critical moment in the product experience, because it is when we send your tax return off to the IRS. And for all of us who have done our taxes ourselves, we know that moment is chalked full of emotion: uncertainty, relief, anxiety, excitement, etc.
Later on we’ll discuss how we curated the transmit experience, having identified it as an own-able moment.
Another fantastic example of an ownable moment is that of Uber’s payment experience, or rather lack of a payment experience.
Think back to the last cab ride you took. There’s a good chance you fumbled with cash, not knowing how much to tip. Of you tried to pay with card but the driver is saying he will only take cash.
What I love about this own-able moment is that Uber didn’t identify payment as an own-able moment and design a better experience. Instead they identified payment as an own-able moment and they completely removed the experience altogether.
Exercise 1:
Now let’s do an exercise to put this into practice (download Exercise 1). Take 5 minutes to identify three own-able moments in the product or service you work on. Identifying these moments is the first step in designing delightful, emotional experiences.
Principle #2: Lean into the emotion
Own-able moments are not meant to create or invoke an emotion in the user. They are meant to identify the user’s emotion so that you can lean into it. If the user is excited or feeling proud, celebrate the moment, prolong that good feeling, pat them on the back.
But here’s the thing, emotional design is not just about delight and positive emotion. In reality, emotional design is about all emotion — good, and especially bad. If the user is feeling uncertain or fearful, don’t shy away from that or sweep it under the rug — instead lean into that emotion. Let the user know you understand where they are emotionally and offer a way to put them at ease.
At TurboTax we understand that our brick-and-mortar competitors have one big advantage over us, and that’s that there’s a person on the other side of the desk getting to know the customer and engaging in a conversation.
So this year we started the TurboTax experience by getting to know our customers a little better. We also wanted to do it in a way that is much more conversational, almost like going to a tax store and chatting with the person across the desk. One of the first things we wanted to know was how are they feeling about doing their taxes — not something you imagine tax software asking you. And whatever the customers response, we had an answer to put them at ease.
If the customer tells us they’re not feeling so good about doing their taxes, we tell them we get it, taxes are pretty crazy, and at times scary. But that’s what we’re here for, to do the heavy lifting and make the experience easier for them.
The funny thing about this: we don’t actually do anything with this information; it doesn’t fill in a field on the 1040 form and we don’t customize the experience based on the answer. But by simply asking it we are letting our customers vent a little and at the same time giving us an opportunity to put them at ease.
Treated with due care and respect, ownable moments have the power to transform a mediocre experience into a delightful, talked-about moment. But ignored, an ownable moment can leave a user feeling abandoned and frustrated.
Exercise 2:
Let’s do another exercise (download Exercise 2). This exercise builds on the last one. Take the own-able moments you identified before and do a brain dump of the emotions the user might be feeling at that moment.
Principle #3: Convey emotion visually
For those of you who have studied cognitive science or psychology, you’ll remember that there are three levels of processing an experience.
- Visceral — This has everything to do with appearance.
- Behavioral — About how the product works and how easy it is to use.
- Reflective — This level of processing is about interpretation, understanding, and reasoning. We bring in things like life experience and memories, social norms, and self-image to help us understand our experiences.
Don Norman points out that the first two levels of processing are very much about the “now” whereas reflective is all about the future and how you will interpret that product or experience after-the-fact (Don Norman, Emotional Design). While it is critically important to design experiences with all three levels of processing in mind, it is the first, the visceral, that is paramount in creating and fostering emotional experiences. It will have downstream effects to the behavioral and reflective levels of processing.
“Appearance can greatly influence perceptions, and we carry that mental model with us when sizing up a website” -Aarron Walter, Designing for Emotion
Visceral designs storied past:
Visceral design has a long and storied past. Take for example the Volkswagen Beetle. The Beetle was first commissioned by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany for economic reasons. He wanted it to be reliable and affordable enough for every German family to own one. But what’s amazing was that it hit the US and became an icon of the 1960s counter culture. “In ’67, the year of the Summer of Love…The unique and unconventional form of the Bug perfectly matched the new revolution” (www.thebeetle.com).
People identified with the vehicle just because of the way it looked. “It has a certain personality to it, an endearing quality” (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2011/04/18/your-first-look-at-the-new-man-like-vw-beetle/). The size of the vehicle and the soft round edges were in stark contrast to the enormity and severity of the Vietnam War, and people had a visceral response to it.
Fast-forward to 1997 and Steve Jobs is back at Apple as the interim CEO. First order of business: consolidate the product lines. A year later they came out with the iMac G3 in a single color — the classic “Bondi Blue”. In retrospect, Jobs said:
“I love the iMac, but we just delivered it in the wrong color,”
So in 1999, Apple re-released the iMac G3 in more colors. But this small maneuver was monumental, “…immediately boosting sales by 24% and driving Apple to its first profitable quarter in two years.” What’s amazing about this is that it shifted the perception of personal computers from “geeky to pop”. And “for the first time ever, the color of a computer became an outlet for self-expression”. How amazing is that? They didn’t change a thing about the hardware; all they did was change the color and Apple customers had this huge visceral response.
So what about the previously mentioned own-able moment of clicking transmit to file your taxes. What the user sees right at the moment they click “Transmit my taxes” will have a huge effect on their current emotional state (visceral), how they perceive the usability of the product (behavioral) and how they interpret their entire experience with TurboTax (reflective). By simply introducing playful animation and beautiful, light-hearted visual design we are able to meet the user where they are emotionally, put them at ease and guide them through the rest of the experience.
As you can see in the From-To, before we really thought about the user and what the user was thinking or feeling at this moment, we designed just another transactional screen.
After declaring this an ownable moment however, we realized this experience needed to be more than transactional. There is emotion here. Not only did they successfully file their taxes themselves, but they’re getting a refund. And for a large portion of our customers, it’s the biggest check they’ll get all year. So we decided to celebrate with our users.
By simply making visual changes, removing UI chrome and focusing on celebratory illustration and content, we created a visceral experience for our users. And as we’ve seen from the overwhelming social media response, this moment is indeed an emotional one, and by carefully designing it we have created quite an impact.
Mailchimp is also doing this really well. Sending an email marketing campaign doesn’t sound like an awfully exciting thing to do, right? Kind of like doing your taxes. But they nail the own-able moments — one being successfully sending an email campaign. It’s a long, arduous process, but let me tell you, when you get a high five from Freddy Von Chimpenheimer IV after sending the email, you start looking forward to it.
They also had an amazing viral response to this. People actually started high-fiving Freddie back. We heard rumor that someone hit their computer screen so hard they broke it. No sure if that’s true, but how cool is that, as a designer, to elicit such an emotional and even physical response.
Principle #4: Humanize the technology
Imagine you are a CPA and I come to you to get my taxes done. What would you say to me if I told you my wife passed away tragically a few months ago and I don’t understand what this means in terms of our taxes?
Now in comparison how would you expect tax software to handle that situation?
There’s this connotation of tax software, or any software for that matter, that it’s just a computer, or a data center on the other side of the screen. But in reality, and specifically in the case of TurboTax, it’s 800 smart, diverse and empathetic people on the other side. And every single one of those people is putting a bit of themselves into the product, and in some areas it shines through. Here is an email we got from a customer this year:
“I finally got around to doing taxes yesterday. After our information was transferred from last years return, it asked if either of us had passed away. I entered the information that [husband] died on June 15, and a screen came up that said “we’re sorry for your loss.” I sat there and stared at it, crying, for a few minutes. It was so cathartic! Please pass on to the team how much that one little sentence meant to me. Whoever thought that up must be a very caring person.”
And all we did here was think about what a human would say in that scenario, not what we thought tax software would say.
Think about all the questions we ask, hundreds of questions, hundreds of pieces of copy. But this is one that really matters. This is an own-able moment, and a negative one at that. By adding this small bit of microcopy we were able to turn this moment from emotionally negative to cathartic for this user, and perhaps countless more.
TurboTax Voice & Tone
At TurboTax this is how we like to visualize our voice and tone strategy. It all comes down to this: if your product were a person, how would you like your customers to describe that person? In the case of TurboTax, we’d like to be described as credible, emotional and conversational.
Exercise 3:
Let’s do one last exercise (download Exercise 3). Think about your product as a person. Choose three attribute pairs, either from the list below or choose your own, and map them on the axes.
The Future of Emotional Design
So that’s where we’re coming from at Intuit. And we’re only at the beginning the journey. Emotional design isn’t going anywhere, it’s only going to become more important. We believe that the future of emotional design will become more about knowing, not assuming, the emotional state of a user. Today we’re just assuming the users emotional state. It’s an educated guess based on qualitative and quantitative research, but imagine a world where we don’t have to guess and we just know. We think this may be possible in the very near future.
Using the camera
There are many apps now that are using the front camera to detect facial expressions and translate the expressions into positive or negative emotion.
This demo is obviously very focused on the entertainment industry (movies and commercials), but imagine the effect this technology could have on products, technology, and design.
Using multi-sensory inputs
Back in 2009 Microsoft submitted a patent that they were finally awarded this April. It is a pair of glasses that will use sensors, including depth cameras and a microphone mounted on the nose bridge, to pick up visual and audio information from the environment. They’ll detect subtle variations in speech rhythm and amplitude, choice of words, type and speed of gestures, eye focus and body posture (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/04/29/microsoft-awarded-patent-for-emotion-detecting-eyeglasses/).
We predict things like this are going to start popping up more often and will get us closer to our user and to understanding them.
Using biometrics
This used to be sci-fi (think Dick Tracy), but now that people are wearing devices on their body that can detect biometric data, it’s not unreasonable to think that very soon we’ll be able to know people’s emotional state at all times. These peripheral technologies are going to start giving us extremely rich information about our users.
