During World Usability Congress 2023, I attended the talk by Bill Albert “Measuring the Emotional User Experience”, who is the SVP and Global Head of Customer Experience at Mach 49. He began his talk by making us think about what makes a successful UX design and showing that it actually goes beyond just good usability and functionality. What matters are the emotions the product makes users feel.
He was talking about how considering a variety of potential emotions a user may experience while interacting with a product helps in designing the experience. To show how this works, Bill had a few examples of when users’ emotions and facial expressions were analysed when they were trying out a certain service or product. He highlighted that the topic of emotional analysis is complex and unequivocal because certain expressions may represent two completely different feelings, for example, a smile can represent either happiness, joy, or uncertainty and confusion. Because of this complexity, researchers try to think of techniques, methods, and tools to help interpret and understand human emotions. Additionally, Bill Albert mentioned the Journal of User Experience – an online journal, which can be accessed by everyone and to my mind, will be a good resource for my future research.
What additionally makes this process even more complex is cultural differences and mentalities. Bill didn’t state this in his talk, but one of the quests had a question about it, which is really important to always keep in mind. Due to this, researchers try to find a way to create more universal models that can adapt to different contexts.
In summary, I chose this for my Impulse because it’s always been fascinating to me – the topic of the multifaceted nature of emotions, and this talk gave me information about what softwares are being used for that and how important it is in the field of UX Design.
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