When designing product packaging, most businesses often pay a lot of attention to aesthetics and functionality. However, they often forget one of the most critical factors: emotions. This is even though emotions are one factor affecting people’s buying decisions.
Studies indicate that emotions affect 70% of buying decisions. Therefore, you need to evoke the right emotions to capture your audience. In this article, we will look at the role of emotion and design in increasing sales.
What Is Emotional Design?
The emotional design uses designs that evoke emotions, resulting in a positive user experience. An emotional design aims to impact the user on three cognitive levels:
- Visceral
- Emotional
- Reflective
This theory is based on the fact that everything has a personality and produces an emotional signal. Even when the designer doesn’t have this in mind, it evokes emotions when customers view a product, website, or top social media page. Therefore, emotional design ensures that your brand evokes positive emotions instead of negative ones.
The Science Behind Emotional Design
Since it’s based on psychology, designers need to understand the fundamentals of psychology to create a product that attracts customers emotionally. Here are several such fundamentals:
Attention and Perceptions
Our attention and perceptions are strongly affected by our emotions. Stimuli that are emotionally charged are more likely to capture our attention than neutral stimuli. The hippocampus(the section responsible for producing emotions) has better memories.
Gestalt Principle
This principle looks at how humans perceive and organize visual information. It suggests that the individual stimuli combine to make sense of a design. They are divided into five different categories. These are:
- Proximity. This has the notion that objects close to one another are the same thing.
- Continuity. According to this principle, our brains see things as continuous instead of disjointed. For instance, movies are just a continuous chain of pictures, but our brains perceive them as one thing. Similarly, music is individual notes that are combined.
- Similarity. This is the way objects piece together depending on their similarity.
- Connectedness. This happens when we see disjointed objects as connected. For instance, when you look at the constellation, you are likely to see
- Closure. This involves our minds filling up the gaps. When your brain understands the letter sequence, you might not notice when letters are missing.
Social evidence
Humans usually make decisions depending on the experience of others. Brands can leverage reviews, testimonials, and other social proof to affect customers’ buying decisions. For instance, including customer reviews in their website design can significantly encourage buying decisions.
Why Emotional Design Matters
Emotions are at the center of how humans interpret things. That’s why brands leverage fear-based marketing. When a brand evokes positive emotions, it elicits curiosity. When designing your brand’s packaging or web presence, you should elicit feelings that make consumers associate positive emotions with the brand. Emotional designs have several benefits for both the product and the user. These include:
Increase user engagement
An emotional design will make a product more attractive and memorable in the user’s mind. In return, this can increase user engagement with the products. This is because users with an emotional connection to a product are likelier to use it and even recommend it to others.
Increase user happiness and loyalty.
When users connect emotionally with a product, they are likelier to be happy with it. In return, they are likely to be committed to the brand. Therefore, an emotional design can help increase customer loyalty and brand retention.
Increased sales
When customers connect emotionally with a product through its design, they are more likely to buy it. Therefore, when the design of your product touches customers emotionally, you will see an increase in sales.
How To Use Emotional Design In Product Design
There are several ways that emotional design can be used in product design. These are:
Understand your target audience
Understanding your target audience is important as millennials react emotionally differently from seniors, so the design that resonates with one group won’t necessarily resonate with the other. To ensure a deeper emotional connection, you should tailor your design elements to meet the needs of different audiences.
Use of storytelling
If you want to elicit emotional responses, one of the best ways is through emotional storytelling. Designers can evoke empathy and engagement by weaving a narrative into a product design’s calmness and tranquillity.
An emotion and design example is a clothing brand that uses brands that resonate with their audiences’ lifestyles, emotions, and aspirations. They also emphasize comfort to evoke a feeling of security while emphasizing a style that triggers pride, confidence, and excitement.
Use the right visuals.
Evey’s design elements, from the colors, typography, imagery, and layout, can tap into a particular emotion. Remember that a compelling emotional design should be more than just visuals. It should evoke emotions, forge connections, and create lasting impressions. An emotional design example can be seen in the following:
- The smooth curves of a smartphone
- Warm ambiance in a cozy cafe
- Soothing colors in a wellness app
Create an anticipatory design
Creating anticipation can be a great way of adding interest to your brand. Using bold and vibrant colors can add anticipation and evoke strong emotions. Other visual elements that can help to create an aura of anticipation cna include loading animations, progress bars, and other visual cues.
Use of color psychology in emotional design
Color psychology is the study of how different colors impact human beings. Because different colors affect emotions, designers can use color combinations to create emotionally engaging designs.
Warm tones like red and orange evoke a feeling of passion and energy, while blue and green evoke a feeling of relaxation, trust, peace, and dependability. Green evokes a feeling of harmony, nature, and reliability. It can be used to create a sense of balance and environmental dependability.
Final Thoughts
Emotional designs have a significant impact on customers’ buying journeys and decisions. By understanding and leveraging the emotional design principles, a brand can connect with customers and affect their buying decisions. With this emotion and design guide, you can increase customer loyalty, retention, and sales.
