Using Emotional Perspective to Design Ecommerce Websites

Everything around you that you interact with has a certain degree of emotional link that triggers you to reach out and use it, touch it, or even see it. The way our emotional responses register against objects and people is truly amazing and without these inherent instincts we cannot tell for sure what it is exactly that we want. This very concept fuels the latest algorithms that predict human behavior. The technology is known as emotional intelligence.

You might not know it yet but many accessories, appliances and devices that you own have traces of emotional intelligence in their system. Manufacturers of smartphones, digital wristwatches and other types of advance gadgetry have dedicated departments for research and development on personalization of emotions in their target audience. Without knowing how the users will respond to their products on an emotional level they dare not take the risk of putting it in the market. To harness the energy of emotional intelligence, personalization algorithms are developed to do the job.

Emotion sensing technology is the stuff of today now. Your smart watch can detect the pulse from your wrist and calculate the probability of your mood. Face recognition software are capable of telling if you are happy, sad or angry just by sensing the curvature of your features.

Examples of Emotionally sensitive Technology in Software and Gadgets

This software pplkpr uses emotional intelligence to track and analyze the emotional and physical responses your body generates when you interact with people around you. With the help of a wrist watch it can tell which people are suitable for you and who to avoid. It’s an auto manager for your relationships that uses personalization algorithms to scan your body and emotional changes.

MoodMetric is a wristband built with sensors that can detect and read human pulse, skin temperature and galvanic skin responses to decipher human emotions of the person.

Foursquare uses similar algorithms to produce recommendations of places the user must visit. It calculates the results from the information users feed to the app, where they go most frequently and from the people the user trusts the most.

Never Mind is among the first games that that uses a wristband and a web cam to detect and track the movement of facial expression to execute its functions. It is developed with Affectiva API and is capable of reading responses like joy, fear and stress etc depending on the physiological biofeedback it receives.

Another device helps play music and videos according to your mood. EmoSPARK uses a smart device that reads word choice, vocal impressions and facial expression for creating its profile on you.

The web design industry has already taken up the task to integrate emotional intelligence within their designs. This will not only allow the users to minimize their efforts in finding the required content, but also help them around situations where involuntary response is required. But how are these websites built from the emotional perspective? Let’s see.

Using Personas

Mostly it counts as strangely volatile customer behavior, but without it there is no guarantee that the consumer is going to buy from your website or not. The first and the foremost phase of getting down an emotionally responsive design for your website is knowing the customer behavior and the best method for that is Personas. Buyer Personas are artificial or fictional representation of your ideal customers that interact with you or have bought from your store at some point. By keeping an army of readied fictional customers you can analyze the responses they would generate when you add a personalization algorithm in your website. This not only increases the emotional intelligence of your web design but also enhances marketing, rankings and conversions on your online store.

Real Time Buying Experience

Emotion sensing technology is not confined to just images and text, but on a wider spectrum it is expressed through voice, gestures and movement that summarize a customer’s emotional upheavals. Getting down gesture controls or voice commands for websites is definitely a cool thing of the future, but quite very impossible for everyone to use given the current statistics. Many online users still are hooked onto their desktops while others with handheld devices rarely use any complex features and prefer to type their way through. To compensate emotionally smart and responsive web experience, web designers add real time features to give the user a walk through from the brick and mortar store the website represents. Features for instance 360 degree view, 3D videos of the store and product display on store shelves with realistic graphics does best to engage the customers and prompt them into purchasing the product for the time being. With the debut of VR (virtual reality) technology a new future awaits the ecommerce industry.

Emotionally Responsive Suggestions

It might have occurred to you on any instance when you were browsing a website, you came across an online advertisement of the same product you visited on another online store a week ago. It’s quite creepy at first when you don’t know what is happening, but eventually you’ll start to get along. On the backstage of the website you are currently there is some white spacing that can be utilized and the algorithm finds the searches you have done recently and puts them on the available space. It calculates how often have you visited the products and even suggests similar and related products from the product pages you clicked. Smarter algorithms are capable of developing a working vocabulary so each time we visit a product page it immediately shows the products on other pages such as Facebook and twitter. By integrating emotionally responsive algorithms to suggest products each website you visit will feel like a friend.

Knowing People

Designing a website from an emotional perspective is about how good you know people. You must understand the perception of your visitors, but it’s even better if you can ask them. What methods you normally use to acquire information? How do people react to different web designs? What are their preferences when it comes to products? Online registration forms have been around since the birth of internet while other methods such as comment logs, questionnaires, forums are also commonly used to learn about customer behaviors. Remember, in order to construct an effectively smart algorithm you need to get as much as you can from the internet. You can also use physical methods to research on emotional links to web design such as interviews, distributing forms and contacting them through phone.

Conclusion

Emotions are never too complicated to be solved. People change and when they do, algorithms must too as well. Without adding emotional perspective in your web design you simply cannot link machine logic with human touch. In order to keep up, make sure you update your emotion sensing data by running your research again and again after a certain period. It is highly anticipated that with the ongoing advancements in technology and the invention of new emotion sensitive software and gadgets, the role of web designers in the coming future will be a challenging one.

Author Bio:

Asad Ali is a professional Internet marketer & design optimization expert at GO-Gulf – a Dubai Website Design company providing custom web designing & development services.