ACTION’S CHAUFFEUR

“If life were as simple as learning to control one’s emotions and make decisions based on reason, then a lobotomized person should be an unstoppable badass, tirelessly industrious, and a ruthless decision maker. Lobotomies would be all the rage.”

“Our emotions are instrumental in our decision making and our actions. We are moved to action only by emotion. Action is emotion. Anger pushes your body to move. Anxiety pulls it into retreat. Joy lights up the facial muscles. Sadness attempts to shade your existence from view. Emotion inspires action, and action inspires emotion. The two are inseparable.” 

- Mark Manson, Everything is F*CKED

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Let me ask you a question. Why did you get up this morning? Let me ask you another question? Why did you decide to start reading this article? And since I have your attention, let me push the boundaries of etiquette and ask you one more question. Why did you imbibe too much over New Year’s and do the chicken dance on top of the bar? There is only one answer to all of these questions. 

Because you felt like it.

A simple answer, and maybe a bit like a third-grade answer as to why they were clogging the toilet with too much tissue paper (I wanted to see how much it could take…give me a break), but the answer is significant and very profound to anyone who is designing, creating, producing or thinking about digital products. Let me elaborate.

Actions are driven by emotions. Sure there are autonomic functions such as breathing and blinking that are not driven by emotions, but those aren’t really actions. They are more like reflexes. But any action that requires any sort of thought, those are driven by emotions. This is how our brain was designed to work. 

Now I am sure there are naysayers who don’t believe this. They think they are purely rational, emotionless beings that only take action based on logic and well reasoned thought, but to those I would simply say that you are wrong. It’s just not how the brain works.

As the brain receives any sort of stimulus (ie. sounds, sites, smells, etc), those signals are passed through the emotional hemisphere to process (a bit of an oversimplification but you can ask a psychiatrist for the med school version). Your brain identifies how you feel about this information and what action needs to occur. This is a feature of evolution. If you think back to the early humans on the savannah and they saw a lion, they didn’t have time to rationally determine whether the lion was friendly or looked satiated. Lions eat people and that makes them scary. So the brain sends the emotion of fear and this fear triggers the action to run. In today’s world it is like looking at your phone when an annoying friend calls. You look at the phone and your brain creates an emotional response that you don’t have time to deal with them right now, so you hit the ignore button. 

This doesn’t mean that all emotions or reactions to them need to be dramatic. If your boss unexpectedly shows up at a meeting and you are trying to secure that big promotion, your emotional response may be stoic to demonstrate how professional you are under pressure, but there was most definitely an emotional response to them showing up. Additionally, emotional responses can change based on updated information. If the early humans saw the lion enough times without any danger, then the fear will begin to dampen. But that is simply a change in the emotional response, not a change to the actual process. All action is driven by emotion. 

Furthermore, not only do emotions drive us to action, but they also play an important role in the creation of memories. It does this in two very important ways. First, memories that are attached to emotions will be remembered more vividly and will be recalled for a longer period of time. Depending on your age, you can probably recall where you were on September 11, 2001 very easily. But do you know what you did on September 10, 2001? Probably not unless that day held some special emotional connection to you. Biologically speaking this makes sense. If you were hunted by a lion, you probably were pretty scared that you might become lunch for the pride. As such, you probably want to be able to recall that quickly for the next time you become prey to a wild beast and be more on guard for potential threats that invoke the same emotion. The more intense the feeling, the faster the body will want to generate a response. Emotions and memory go hand in hand. 

The second role of emotions in memory is less straightforward. Not only will emotions be remembered more quickly and for longer, but they will actually shape what the memory is. Depending on one’s emotional state at the time, what is actually remembered will be affected. If you are happy, you may recall the sun shining, the warmth on your face and the pleasant sounds of birds chirping in nearby trees. If you are sad, you may recall the dead plants, painful sunburn and birds taking a crap on you as you walked under the trees. Need an example? If you were a Patriots fan in 2002 in the playoff game against the Raiders, you clearly saw that Tom Brady was trying to complete a forward pass and not a fumble. If you were a Raider fan, you will fight to the death that Tom had pulled the ball back and it was a clear fumble. Your emotional state affects not only what gets remembered, but also how it gets remembered. (It’s interesting to note how time and changes in one’s feelings actually change the memory itself…but that is a different discussion.)

I am sure that you must be asking “thanks for the psychology lesson, but what does this have to do with designing digital products?” I am getting there. Don’t get emotional. 

As a young marketer it was pounded into my head that there needed to be a clear “call to action” in everything that I produced. An email, website, whitepaper, blimp banner; they all had to have a clear call to action. But there was never any discussion really about the emotions of the audience. What are the emotional drivers or the audience? What emotion will invoke the action that was desired? Yes, a call to action is important, but the emotional drivers must be at the center of any discussion about what will move an audience. 

In their study on brand loyalty, the experience management (XM) organization, Qualtrics, found that “the way a person feels after interacting with a company is more important even than whether they were able to successfully do what they wanted to do.” In other words, how a person feels about their experience is more important than actually accomplishing the thing they set out to do. Despite this, many companies still try to remove emotions and feelings from their interactions with customers. Whether a website hiding return information or call-centers reading from robotic scripts, organizations routinely demonstrate they do not understand how their customers feel. 

Even organizations that are well intentioned and build features that they think their customers will want, often find their products in the digital dustbin because it failed to connect with them. They failed to truly understand the emotions and motivations of their users. 

My point is this, it’s hard enough to create a digital product from a technical standpoint. Great code and great technology isn’t easy to produce. But understanding your audience..well, that’s even harder. Users often can’t articulate how they feel or are too embarrassed to say that their real motivation is to get revenge on their high-school bullies. But this is not just a crucial step in designing digital products, it is the most crucial step. There must be an emotional northstar to guide the process.