4 min read
Feelings are requirements
Emotional design usually arrives last, as warmth applied to a finished thing. On the projects I care about it arrives first, as the constraint that decides what the thing can be.
The standard order of operations is: solve the problem, then make it feel good. Requirements, flows, states, edge cases. And then, near the end, someone adds an illustration of a friendly cloud and a line of copy that says we know this is frustrating. The feeling is treated as a finish. Something you apply to a surface once the structure underneath has been settled by other means.
I have worked that way. It produces products that are perfectly usable and that people quietly stop using.
Here is the version I believe now. On any product that touches something a person finds difficult, their emotional state is not a quality of the experience. It is a constraint on the solution space, and it belongs in the requirements document next to the technical ones.
A health portal is the clearest case. On Olive-Ilive I kept meeting a problem that looked like an efficiency problem: people abandoned forms partway through. The efficiency answer is well known. Fewer fields, better progress indication, save and resume. All good moves. None of them touch the actual reason, which is that some of the questions are humiliating to answer truthfully, and abandoning the form is a rational way to avoid saying the true thing to a screen that has given you no reason to trust it.
Once the feeling is written down as a requirement, it starts doing what requirements do: it rules things out. It tells you that the progress bar counting down to the end of the questionnaire is working against you, because it turns a disclosure into a chore to be completed. It tells you that the field labelled Other, please specify is where your most important data is going to die. It suggests, quite specifically, that the order of the questions matters more than the number of them, because trust is built in the first three and spent in the rest.
None of that comes from asking what feeling should this evoke. It comes from asking what is this person's actual emotional position when they arrive here, and what does that make impossible.
The failure mode I watch for in myself is the opposite one. Treating emotional framing as a licence to skip the functional work. It is very pleasant to write a paragraph about dignity and much harder to specify the empty state. A feeling that has not been turned into a decision about a screen is not design yet. It is just a good intention with better vocabulary.
So the test I apply is blunt: name the feeling, then name the thing it stopped you from building. If there is no second half, the first half was decoration.