Emotional Mapping for User Flows

Most experience designers only consider the system view during the design process. As a human-centered designer, understanding the system view is a hygiene factor.

Fine, but your real job is to figure out how to design for people.

After mapping out an overview of the “conversation” between a human and technology, I start designing.

I make assumptions on what emotions a task inherently evokes. Does the human feel stressed, bored, happy, interested, or scared?

Once I have a better idea of feelings inherent to the task, I map emotion to activity and what emotion we should aim to evoke. For example, in airline payment flows we’d want to create a soothing narrative like: “You can still change your seat on the next page”.

While buying a flight ticket is bad enough, imagine buying a whole damn house where stress levels can quickly go through the roof. A declined offer on your dream home will make you feel miserable, frustrated or angry — or some unholy combination of all three.

Dear designer: it’s your job to adjust the tone to cater to the situation and enable more positive emotions.

Consider adding encouraging text in the rejection email or recommend actions that will improve the chance of getting an offer accepted.

Not only is emotional mapping massively beneficial, but I like it because it is a lot of fun — and it helps me design truly cohesive, human-centered solutions.