Want to convey how bad a user experience is? Talk about the user's emotion
User counts aren't the most crucial thing to summarize: emotions are
"There's no point in fixing anything. I'd rather you rebuild this whole stupid application." A user spoke bitterly, sounding like he'd given up on making things better.
We often see a wide range of emotions when we test with users. Whether banging the table in frustration or self-deprecating because they don't understand, users often react to tasks differently.
However, we don't often know what to do with this, so we often ignore this data. That's a mistake I learned you shouldn't make when designing personas of people who recently got a cancer diagnosis. People are emotional creatures: we can't just design for them on their good days.
Showcasing your user's emotions is often one of the most important things to do because it can be a critical step in getting your team to take action.
This is because we're doing qualitative research, and talking about emotions is one of our strengths.
The ineffectiveness of user counts in research presentations
One of the first lessons I learned when learning Data Storytelling was to pay less attention to counting the number of participants who did something.
It sounds counter-productive: after all, isn't it great to know that 4 out of 5 users did X or said Y? From your perspective, yes. However, several issues come up when you consider how your audience might interpret those things.
If you say 5/5 or 4/5 users ran into this issue, we can emphasize that this problem may be common.
However, how about if 3/5 users ran into a problem? Some of your team might want to interpret that as 60% of all users ran into this problem, but that's different from how statistics works.
In addition, what if something critical happened to only 1/5 of the users? For example, you talked with four people aged 25–30 and 1 person aged 55. The 55-year-old might have uncovered some critical issues, but saying 1/5 users had trouble de-emphasizes your finding.
However, your team may not know what to think about these user counts if it’s not 5/5 users encountering something. Qualitative research isn't quantitative research, so we shouldn’t present it that way.
Instead, we can lean into storytelling around emotion to help.
Emotions, with design, are focused on problems or tasks
Storytelling around emotion is compelling for one critical reason: emotions are directly tied to the product or user experience.
We may occasionally run into users frustrated by something entirely outside our application. Still, it's far more likely that we'll observe a user who is frustrated explicitly about some problem, feature, or aspect of the user experience.
However, our leading problem, and why we tend to ignore them, is that emotions are hard to quantify. After all, when you say "Users were frustrated," does that mean it was a minor annoyance for them, or were they ready to completely give up on your product?
In addition, it is often hard to talk about the business impact of these emotions, which is often what your team is thinking about. But here's the thing: you don’t need to know that. Instead, all you need to do is to convey a straightforward story.
Your users want to address a need, solve a problem, or use your product, but something needs to be fixed. They can't do it for specific reasons (that our team can fix), so they expressed certain emotions about the subject.
There's just one extra step you need to take, and that comes from thousands of top charities. Rather than counting the number of users and aggregating them, focus on an individual.
The Power of the Individual: driving a Story through emotion
Have you ever noticed that some of the most effective charities don't try to overwhelm you with facts and figures?
They begin by focusing on a single person struggling with a simple problem. For example, they describe Malika, a young girl who can't attend school because she has to carry water from the river for her family.
They then add relatable details and emphasize emotions to get you to act. For example, Malika is the youngest of 6 children, and her teacher has petitioned her to come to school (as she's a bright student who probably could get a scholarship). However, because her family can't afford a water pump, which costs $10, she has to make a hazardous 4-mile trip to the river three times a day to bring enough water.
People are compelled to take action when you tell that story. For the price of a lunch, you can make a difference in a young girl's life and get her the education she desperately wants.
The other thing to emphasize is that we show emotions instead of tell. We don't say, "She's frustrated with this; please fix it." Instead, they present a frustrating scenario we can empathize with to drive us to act.
So this is how we should structure our user findings to get the same level of engagement, hopefully.
How to tell stories around user emotion with your findings
Imagine you were working with a headline like "3 out of 5 users ran into issues onboarding".
What can we do to turn this aggregate finding into one more appropriately expressing emotion? We can follow a template like this:
Headline: What is the problem in as simple terms as possible?
1st paragraph: What is an individual example of this problem? What are details about this example that the audience might want to know?
2nd paragraph: What are the aggregate details, and how high priority is this issue?
Last paragraph: What's your design recommendation/call to action?
When we follow this template, we might rephrase that finding like this:
Headline: Users are getting overwhelmed during onboarding.
1st paragraph: One user spent 6 minutes on the 2nd page of onboarding, Googling unfamiliar terms and reading help documents because he didn't understand all the concepts we threw at him.
2nd paragraph: It wasn't just him: 3/5 users paused, re-read the text, or had questions about several of the concepts we presented on that page.
Last paragraph: We need to abstract several concepts to simplify them and only introduce 1–2 concepts at a time to avoid overwhelming them.
This structure focuses on the individual struggle, attaching relevant details that hint at users' emotions. We can even add user quotes to help emphasize how they’re feeling for greater effect.
Remember, the point of these user findings is not to give a quantitative-like user aggregation: we don't have a large enough sample size for statistical significance. Instead, it's important to point to where your users struggled and understand the impact of these problems.
This is what storytelling around emotion can offer you.
Humans are not logical creatures; they are emotional ones
The more I immerse myself in both the Design and Data environments, the more I learn that Data can't explain everything.
Often, what people say and what people do are entirely different. Part of that is often tied to their emotional state; our users are emotional creatures.
From a logical perspective, you and your competitors might have equally decent products. But because a product appeals to a user's emotions or because they had a negative (and frustrating) first experience with a product, they'll always stick with your product.
Humans are emotional creatures, which you’ve seen through user testing. However, businesses don't make decisions based on users' emotions. Storytelling helps to bridge that gap. By tying a user's problems not to quantitative facts or user counts but to their emotional experiences around a product, you can convey why addressing this issue is essential.
It's not because 3/5 users ran into that issue, although it helps. It's because an individual user experience is so negative or emotional that it's likely to impact things businesses care about significantly.
So whenever you see your users emotionally react during user testing, note it and try to tell a story around it.
Doing so can get the emotional core of your users' needs and suggestions to resonate more than you realize.
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Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.