Is ‘Emotive UI’ the future of UX?

In today’s world, ‘socializing’ essentially means, being active on social networking sites. People are sharing all sorts of emotions such as happiness, triumphs, mishaps, and grievance with their online friends, followers, and contacts. So, they want to minimize the differences between their online UX Design and real-world experiences.

One of the crucial features of online user experience designing is that it lacks emotion. For instance, if a person experiences an extreme delight after having a meal at a chick restaurant, he or she now expect a similar kind of engagement through user interface designing on the restaurant’s website or its social networking page. However, the real-life elements like the restaurant’s delightful ambiance and warm service are quite difficult to replicate on its website. This is where emotive User Interface & user experience designing steps in.

As per Robert Plutchik’s theory of emotion, there are eight primary emotions that include anger, disgust, sadness, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, and joy. Most businesses are always looking to surprise and delight the users, which can give rise to joy, trust, and loyalty in them. Thus, emotion has been perceived as the consequence of design up till now, which is about to change in the future.

Emotion has evolved as a vital ingredient that can drive the user experience, and most designers are looking to tap its enormous potential. While it’s too early to confirm, the industry pulse depicts that Emotive UI has all it takes to take on the conventional design techniques by storm. The premonition is conceived on the fact that end-users, being humans, are a hotchpotch of emotions and sooner or later, the designers would have to find a way to deal with the inevitable of dealing with it.

Sherine Kazim, who has conceived an emoji-based version of Plutchik’s wheel of emotion, believes that the form of User Interface that most accurately reflects our emotional spectrum is emojis. She points to the fact that in the chart that there is a dissipation of intensity that happens as you move further out on the wheel. She also thinks it’s surprising that nobody in design has talked about it yet.

Kazim says “We tend to create products that aim for the center-wheel emotions, because it’s the easiest thing to convey. We rarely think about the full spectrum, and we don’t think about the dissipation. Currently, most designers think about the design intention and the user reaction: ‘I want to make you happy,’ and the user is happy.”

Based on her reasoning, it would be safe to predict that designer will now start designing UI that focuses on primary emotion as well as its dissipation. Efforts would be made to make the communication between people and products more meaningful and emotion-filled, and this could apply to the interactions between the users and websites as well. As this connection is set to get stronger, a well-designed User Interface could well be able to manage the entire emotional spectrum of the users with ease.