How to Design for How People Feel

Why does a checkout that passes every test still leave someone hesitating at the Pay button? And why do reasonable adults argue with a laptop? (No judgment. The laptop started it.)

Because people don’t experience products objectively. A product can work exactly as intended and still feel bad to use.

The Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) describes emotional design[1] as designing for how people respond emotionally, not only for function. Paul Jarvis calls it design created for human beings first[2].

1. Understand the person before the interface.

Before you decide what a product should look like, figure out the life it will live. Who’s using it, where, and when? What are they trying to get done?

Most of us start with the screen. Fair enough. But then you’re designing for no one in particular.

A navigation app used while driving has different emotional requirements from one used to plan a vacation from the couch. The driver needs the next turn at a glance. The planner wants to wander. Sometimes they’re the same person on a Tuesday and a Saturday.

Context isn’t background. It’s the brief.

2. Account for the mood they bring.

Nobody opens your app in a neutral state.

IxDF traces people’s emotional states to three sources[3]: disposition, like depression, which can color how someone feels about everything; relationships, like how steady things are at home, which people often can’t control; and run-ins with the things around them, like a computer that refuses to do what they want.

Andreas Komninos, writing for IxDF[4], adds that how any of it lands depends on cognition, mood, and surroundings.

A review of the research[5] by Jennifer Lerner and colleagues finds that emotions shape decisions powerfully and routinely. Integral emotions come from the decision itself: unease at a payment screen that asks for too much. Incidental emotions ride in from somewhere else: a bad morning that makes every error message feel worse.

Picture a student opening a study app the night before an exam. The anxiety comes with the task.

That anxiety isn’t the app’s fault, but it is the app’s problem.

3. Design for confidence.

In my experience, the feeling that gets people to act is confidence. When someone understands what’s happening, what they can do, and what comes next, acting feels easier.

The tempting move is to show everything up front. It feels generous. But every extra detail is one more thing to weigh.

Progressive disclosure is the fix: give people enough for the decision in front of them, and let them choose to go deeper. The goal isn’t to look minimal; it’s to reduce unnecessary uncertainty. That might mean cutting a paragraph, or adding the one sentence that answers the question they’re about to ask.

If someone taps a button and nothing happens for a few seconds, they start wondering whether it worked. Some quietly back off. A loading state won’t shorten the wait, but it makes it understandable.

Say what’s happening. Show progress. Confirm when it’s done.

Nobody taps the next button while they’re still wondering about the last one.

4. Offer fewer choices at a time.

We like having options. But wanting a choice and making one are different things.

In a 2000 paper[6], Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found that a grocery display of 24 jams drew more shoppers than one of 6. Yet about 30 percent of people who stopped at the smaller display bought a jar, against 3 percent at the bigger one. People choosing from 6 chocolates were more satisfied than those choosing from 30.

Choice overload isn’t a law of nature. A 2010 meta-analysis[7] by Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues pooled 50 experiments and found an average effect near zero. A 2015 one[8] by Alexander Chernev and colleagues found overload shows up reliably when options are hard to compare, the decision is difficult, or people are unsure what they want. That describes a lot of interfaces.

So there’s a tension. More options can make a product look more capable while making the decisions inside it harder.

The answer usually isn’t fewer features. It’s deciding when each choice appears. Show the settings most people change, and tuck the rest a level down.

Stage the choices before you cut them.

5. Aim each screen at one feeling.

Simplicity isn’t only an aesthetic decision. Jarvis argues[2] that emotional design depends on it, because it’s easier to trigger one emotional response than several.

Think about an upgrade screen. Five equally prominent actions, paragraphs of copy, pricing comparisons, testimonials, an FAQ, and an animation. Together, they give you a chore: work out what deserves your attention.

Pick the one decision the screen is for. Let everything else wait. What’s left creates a clearer feeling:

I understand this. I know what happens next. I can make a decision.

That feeling is confidence.

A screen that tries to make you feel five things usually lands on one: tired.

6. Make the result worth the effort.

Heckel’s law[9] proposes that the quality of an interface matters relatively little to adoption when the perceived value is high. Nigel Derrett named it in 2004[10], after Paul Heckel, and built his case on the bassoon: a hard, inconsistent instrument musicians still spend hundreds of hours learning.

Photoshop is complicated. So is professional video editing. So are plenty of developer tools. People learn them anyway.

That doesn’t mean usability doesn’t matter. It means usability can’t make up for missing value.

Before you polish, ask the three questions Jarvis uses[2]. How will this serve our audience better? How will it make their lives easier? What about it is valuable to them?

A beautifully designed product nobody needs is still a product nobody needs.

7. Earn the second visit.

A feeling about a product builds over time. Jarvis names three things[2] emotional web design has to get right, usually in this order:

• First impression. Does it feel made for me?
• Function. Does it behave the way I expect?
• Perceived value. Would I come back?

They line up loosely with the circles on the cover, Don Norman’s three levels of design[11]. Visceral is the gut reaction to how something looks. Behavioral is the pleasure and effectiveness of using it. Reflective is what it means to you afterward: the story you tell about it, what it says about you, and whether it was worth it.

Norman sees the three running together, so a neat sequence is a simplification. A useful one.

Visual design’s real test is whether people act. My bet is that a strong feeling plus one clear call to action moves people. Give the feeling somewhere to go.

A beautiful first impression can get someone through the door. It can’t make them stay.

8. Pick the personality on purpose.

Don Norman, quoted by IxDF[1], notes that people read a personality into a design even when the designer never intended one.

Picture an app with a playful onboarding flow, a scolding warning, and a settings page that reads like a lease. It’s three strangers taking turns.

So choose one. Imagine the product as a person. Jarvis suggests asking[2] how it would dress, how it would speak, and what it would like, then letting the answers settle wording, color, and typefaces.

I’d add a question of my own: how would it react when you make a mistake? The error message is where you find out who the product really is.

Personality isn’t added after the interface is finished. It’s the accumulation of hundreds of small decisions.

9. Get out of the way.

Someone holding a camera wants the photograph, not the controls. Someone opening a running app wants a record of the run, not a tour of the interface. (I design a biology study app, and I’d be worried if anyone opened it to admire the buttons.)

IxDF notes[3] that for many successful products, the interface becomes something people barely notice. To be adopted, a product has to meet people’s core demands and produce a positive response, or very little response at all.

That’s why emotional design doesn’t mean making every interaction delightful. Delight has its place.

A banking app doesn’t need to be exciting. A password reset doesn’t need to be memorable. A checkout doesn’t need to surprise anyone. For flows like these, the feeling you’re designing for is:

Nothing went wrong. I understood what to do. I felt confident. I finished.

Sometimes the best interaction is the one the user never thinks about.

Design the feeling around the task.

Komninos sums up the designer’s job[4]: understand how the things we make affect people, then use that to improve the experience and, on a grander scale, our lives.

On the cover, the middle ring is behavioral, and its second line trails off: It makes me feel… That’s the sentence emotional design is trying to finish. Often, the right word is confident. When it’s done well, people are too busy doing what they came to do to finish the sentence at all.

The interface isn’t the goal.

It’s how people get to theirs.