Not Just Delight: Negative Emotions in UX Design
#56: How Negative Emotions Can Improve User Experience
Welcome to Fundament, a weekly product design newsletter where we share actionable tips and insightful stories with the worldwide design community.
Not Just Delight: Negative Emotions in UX Design
Some time ago, I published an article titled From Function to Emotions in UX Design, which introduced the concept of Emotional Design and the benefits of incorporating it into a product. In that article, I focused on how positive emotions can enhance user experience, increase engagement and loyalty, and help build a competitive edge.
However, it’s worth knowing that while we as designers strive to create the best possible user experiences and certainly don’t want users to feel frustrated or dissatisfied, consciously leveraging negative emotions can actually lead to an overall improvement in experience and even boost engagement. Just think of social campaigns that use powerful, moving messages to provoke thought and action.
What can we achieve with negative emotions?
People are naturally more engaged when strong emotions are involved, and this also applies to the products and services we design. If we carefully design the use of negative emotions, users may perform their tasks more accurately and make fewer mistakes because they will be in a more focused state. Negative emotions can also serve as motivation; for example, someone might return to exercising after a long break because they feel ashamed for skipping their workouts. However, such emotional triggers must be used carefully to avoid reinforcing feelings of guilt.
Negative emotions can also enhance storytelling, helping to boost user engagement in products such as donation platforms. They can foster empathy and build trust in the brand.
In addition, negative emotions can be a valuable source of insight into what is not working in our product. They help identify pain points that cause frustration or irritation and highlight areas that need improvement.
Examples of negative emotions
Anxiety and urgency
Anxiety increases users' attention and focus, which makes them stop acting on autopilot. As a result, they make fewer mistakes because they start acting more cautiously, reading instructions more carefully, and absorbing information more effectively.
Urgency, on the other hand, motivates users to make quick decisions. This is often used in e-commerce, where countdown timers for limited-time offers or low stock indicators encourage faster purchases.
Frustration
Frustration is an emotion that often arises when users struggle to complete a task that is difficult or overly complex. When we are frustrated, our attention narrows and we focus intensely on the problem and how to solve it. In a positive context, this can motivate users to learn, understand how the system works, and try to resolve the issue. On the other hand, too much frustration can lead to users abandoning the product in dissatisfaction. We can also use frustration as a signal to identify problem areas in the experience and optimize them to improve overall usability.
Sadness
Sadness can be used to strengthen messaging and create emotional connection with a product. It often appears in experiences related to charity campaigns or fundraising, where it is used to increase empathy and willingness to donate.
Fear and concern
Emotions like fear or concern help protect users from making mistakes by drawing their attention to important security or risk-related issues. Examples include warnings before irreversible actions like deleting files, notifications about suspicious activity on an account, or password strength indicators that use fear of potential attacks to encourage stronger security practices.
Shame
A mild sense of shame can encourage users to change their behavior in a more positive direction. Shame can be used, for example, in fitness or learning apps that show how many days you have been inactive, or in finance apps that highlight your spending patterns to motivate better financial habits. However, designers should be very careful when using shame. If overdone or poorly implemented, it can damage the user's emotional comfort and lead to guilt, which can have the opposite effect of what was intended.
Negative Emotions and Ethics
Finally, it's important to consider the ethical aspects of using emotions in design, especially negative ones. Like many other tools available to us, negative emotions can be used either to support the user or to manipulate them for personal or business gain.
Ethical use of negative emotions can help inform, warn, motivate action, encourage deeper engagement, or promote caution. Unethical use, on the other hand, involves deliberate manipulation, deception, and exploiting fear, guilt, or urgency to benefit the company at the user's expense.
When choosing to use negative emotions in our designs, we need to plan carefully and make sure we are not crossing ethical boundaries. Instead of helping users, unethical design choices can cause them harm. We should not just think about causing bad emotions, but strategically plan them to lead to positive effects in the end.