Activities

Tears, Cheers and Puppy Dog Ears: Emotion in UI

Session Title

Tears, Cheers and Puppy Dog Ears: Emotion in UI

Presenter

Aye Moah, Choicestream

Session Type: Activity

The best software designs inspire passion in their users. They create this passion the same way that traditional marketers do. But instead of showing images of puppies and babies, they craft their interaction design to incite emotional responses. In this session, we’ll roll up our sleeves and try to make our users cry (with delight)!

We’ll spend the first 10 minutes going over which emotions to evoke and a few techniques that evoke them. Some examples we’ll explore are: political donation bats, humorous self-effacing error messages, and Mint.com’s budget graphs that make me feel guilty every time I get an over-budget alert.

Next, we’ll divide into groups and work on redesigning an oh-so-boring portal site to incorporate these ideas. We’ll breathe life into what’s typically stodgy and soulless, and figure out how an emotional infusion can make collaborating fun and maybe even exciting. Each group will work on a different section, and we’ll spend the last 10 minutes putting it all together. Experiment, explore, and try to add some emotion to it!

Biography

Aye Moah is a User Experience Engineer at ChoiceStream, where she makes arcane advertising algorithm experiments understandable to non-geeks. Her experience spans software development, product management, interaction design, and information architecture. At Cisco WebEx, Moah designed a stodgy but full-of-soul web calendar product from the ground up.

She holds a B.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering, where she discovered her passion for applying the very latest in technology to the field of UI. Her User Experience Design session at Product Camp Boston 2009 and presentation at the Boston UPA Mini-Conference 2009 received accolades from the Twitterverse. She originally hails from Burma, and she loves great ethnic food, travel, books, and playing with her two pet rats, Xeno and Nero.

2 Comments

  1. Posted September 27, 2009 at 7:17 pm

    This sounds like a great exercise in illustrating emotional design principles through examples and workshopping.

  2. Posted October 1, 2009 at 10:36 pm

    Pushing design thinking to incorporate emotion sounds like a great exercise.