CASE STUDY
Emotion Lotion
A presentation that sparked a new way to measure design impact
The power of story can move an organization to measure the impact of user feelings.
Role
Creative Direction, Narrative Strategy, Presentation Design, Deck Authoring
Delivery
PowerPoint deck, Emotion Mapping Workshops
INSIGHT
“Gallup quantified the link between employee feelings and corporate outcomes, reporting that lost productivity due to disengaged staff costs the U.S. economy up to $350 billion annually. Human emotions are real and they impact a wide range of material business metrics, from a company’s share price, to the value of its brand, through to its customer service rating.”*
*Feelings and Emotion Affect Workplace Performance, Glenn Riseley,
As a storyteller on Design Day, I wanted to improve our design process, with a key insight:
Emotions Drive Decisions
Drawing on my video game roots, I saw that productivity software tracked usability but ignored the emotions that drive and enhance performance, leading me to author a presentation on the impact emotions have on customers.
Using examples from film and video games, I made the case that designing toward customer feelings would not only increase product engagement, but also accelerate internal alignment.
Storytelling can move organizations: this deck helped spark Microsoft’s Feelings Toolkit, which uses emotional feedback from customers as a predictive lens for Net Promoter Scores (NPS).
Measuring emotions using the
Feelings Toolkit
Feelings deeply influence user behavior*
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Increase tolerance
More likely to continue, explore more, and be open to experimentation.
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Form habits
Positive emotions facilitate consistent use necessary to forming new habits.
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Make it "sticky"
Drives retention by building bonds users miss when they’re gone.
* Insights from The Feelings Toolkit, Derek DeBellis, Trish Miner
Inspired by the Feelings Toolkit, Emotion Mapping Workshops helped identify gaps in the customer journey, directly shaping feature roadmaps for Enterprise design teams.
Scaling across a product suite
We ran Emotion Mapping Workshops, leading teams to ideate sample flows of their product with idealized emotional beats based on customer signal, previous feedback, and research insights.
Abstracting experiences by linking features and capabilities to a ideal Customer emotions allowed teams to align design decision more quickly, test experiences more effectively, and build products in which customers connected more deeply.