01.03 People Go Online for Emotional Reasons - Page 6

01.03.05 We seek intensity on the Web.

How much we enjoy a Web experience depends on the degree to which we find it arousing. Is it just "good," or is it "really, really good?" Is it merely "bad," or is it "terrible"? Reeves and Nass use the word "valence" to refer to the judgment we make about something being either good or bad. "Arousal" is used to indicate the level of intensity that we attribute to the valence. They state: "Valence and arousal are essentially biological." Taken together, they’re the "…two basic dimensions of emotion." Reeves and Nass offer these examples:

"Flowers, a cute baby, and erotica all have positive valence, but they have distinctly different levels of arousal: Erotica ranks highest and flowers, lowest. Similarly, a funeral procession and mutilated bodies are both negative, but only [mutilated bodies] will produce significant arousal.

"As things get arousing, they also are more likely to be either good or bad. Neutrality, it turns out, is not a big part of excitement. It is also difficult to find material that is extremely good or bad and totally un-arousing–it’s hard to be blasé about highly valenced material."

Reeves and Nass have done a great job explaining how we get excited. What’s even more significant is their reason for why getting people excited is important. When we get excited about an experience we have, we pay closer attention and tend to remember the details of that experience more than we would if the experience had been blasé. In a nutshell, excitement can be used as a memory aid. Isn’t this one of the chief aims of any online marketing or communications initiative–to make a message as memorable as possible? As it turns out, designing our Web enterprises to be emotionally engaging isn’t a luxury–it’s a necessity. Of course, people in sales and advertising have known this for many years, as Reeves and Nass plainly state in their book:

"The basis for the success of a [Web enterprise], in addition to [its] usability and efficiency, is often the potential to arouse. This may require changes in the ways that [Web enterprises] are evaluated."

This is something that both usability and experience design specialists need to understand.

01.03.06 We seek catharsis on the Web.

It’s important to understand that one major way people seek emotional satisfaction when they go online is through a notion taken from psychodynamic theory known as catharsis.

Catharsis is the emotional release of tension that we feel when we watch others (in media or otherwise) experience or express something that we ourselves are inhibited from feeling or expressing in real life. Closely associated with this notion is the notion of vicarious release, whereby we live out our own fantasies through the lives of others. We live vicariously through those we know; like our children, for example, when we push them in sports to achieve goals that we ourselves were not able to achieve. We can also live vicariously through fictionalized characters such as those in fantasy role-playing games such as EverQuest®. In both cases, we have the opportunity to experience catharsis if the stimulus that we’re experiencing is sufficient to draw our minds into the illusion and trap us there. Richard Harris writes in A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication:

"Many emotions are enjoyable to experience vicariously. Many comedies show people in embarrassing situations that are more humorous when happening to someone else. TV characters may do things we would like to do but have moral or ethical proscriptions against."

01.03.07 We seek drama on the Web.

Sigmund Freud said, "We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things." What Freud is saying is that for people to get excited about something, it has to rise above the drone of everyday life.

For most people, life seems typical, drab, and sometimes downright boring. The cure for this sense of the mundane is drama. The mechanism that is the vehicle for the range of emotions that we experience through catharsis is known as dramatization. We’re fascinated by the intrigues of the seedier side of life–thus the popularity of romance fiction and reality entertainment. Often people go online to add a more interactive dimension to the drama they experience through television or films. The Web offers organizations the ability to allow people to choose the aspects of a storyline that they want to dramatize. Krome Barratt writes in Logic & Design in Art, Science & Mathematics:

"Dramatization is the process of making an experience more exciting, vivid, emotionally stirring, and memorable. [Dramatization is] achieved by emphasizing some aspect of an experience at the expense of others. Selection, abstraction and hierarchy are of its essence, and these to be reordered, grouped and juxtaposed to maximum effect…Drama is a meeting and rivalry of human antithesis. In counterpoint, two contrasting themes which share a common space-time scale discuss, compete, debate, argue, fight for their point of view."

01.03.08 Sterilizing Web experiences is a seriously flawed experience design strategy.

If the only way people can experience intense enjoyment is through rising above the drone of everyday life, how can it make sense to ask Web enterprises to standardize on a design status quo that strips out every component that can lead to emotional fulfillment?

When we sterilize the material that our Web enterprises present, it puts MORE burdens on the people interacting with them, not fewer. Is this a practical approach to designing Web experiences? Hardly. As I mentioned in 01.01.03, it’s actually quite difficult to pay attention to things that bore us to death! People want more out of their consumptive, social, and emotional exploration on the Web than merely getting it over with. They want to find satisfaction throughout the experience, not merely as a result of the experience. This notion seems so intuitive; how has our industry gotten so far off track?

01.03 People Go Online for Emotional Reasons - Page 5
Train of Thoughts - Designing the Effective Web Experience
01.04 Grappling with Our Misdirection - Page 7