What Is Emotional Website Design?

Creating an emotional connection could mean the difference between converting and losing customers

Why do we click that “Buy Now” button? No doubt it’s some combination of price, quality, and convenience — our brains churning their economic engines, crunching data into a decision, as they do dozens of times a day.

But what about our hearts? The reality is the decision to buy often has much more to do with the way something makes us feel. There are countless studies supporting this, including one Harvard professor who suggests that 95% of consumer decisions are made subconsciously. In other words, we tend to convert based on our emotions more than any other factor.

What does that mean for e-commerce brands — or anyone pitching anything online? Any successful website needs to aim for the gut as much as the head. That’s where the concept of emotional design comes into play.

What is emotional design?

Emotional design is a concept coined by Don Norman in his book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. The essential premise is that emotions have a crucial role in the human ability to understand the world and learn new things. In reality, all design is emotional, whether intentional or not; the trick is in shaping the user’s emotional response to the benefit of your product or service.

Applying that to the web, user experience designer Aaron Walter, author of the book Designing for Emotion, says positive emotional experiences can make users “feel like there’s a person, not a machine, at the other end of the connection.” This is critical. There is a machine at the other end, and more often than not, when buying something online, a user won’t have a single human interaction throughout the course of their transaction. Except maybe with the delivery man.

The goal, then, is to design e-commerce websites and other digital products that feel as attractive, real, and authentic as they do organized and efficient. That’s the stuff that translates to pleasure, joy, excitement, humor, anticipation, surprise, or any number of points on a spectrum of positive emotions.

Any successful website needs to…