In the midst of a global pandemic and social unrest, with a backdrop of technology feeling increasingly adversarial, and a collective realization that the internet that brought us together also has the power to tear us apart, it’s time we acknowledge that designing for delight falls woefully short in feeding the needs of the human spirit.

It’s great when well-designed products can put a smile on our face. Digital designers learned how to do that quite well in the past decade. But human emotion is multidimensional, complicated, and mercurial. Nothing like a pandemic to amplify that truth, right?

We’ve got to figure out how to design for the whole human experience, which includes negative emotions too.

Headspace: Acknowledging stress and anxiety

Companies like Headspace, the app that teaches us mindfulness and meditation, consider the sharp edges of stress, fear, and anxiety people bring to their product and design for these emotions. So much of their product design approach is about acknowledging the imperfections of the mind and the swirling emotions within.

Press “play” to begin meditation and the circle containing the play button begins to undulate, moving like the mind in unpredictable directions, impossible to control. It’s reassuring, as if it’s acknowledging that our imperfections are welcome here.

Character animation illustrates the messiness of our mind and softens the shame of confronting one’s imperfections.

TurboTax: Acknowledging loss

Intuit, makers of TurboTax, have considered the sadness their customers confront when filing one's taxes for the first time after the loss of a loved one. Re-experiencing deep sadness in the clinical setting of tax preparation software can be dehumanizing, but TurboTax thoughtfully acknowledges this loss with a well written message: “We’re sorry to hear about your loss. You can count on us to help you get your tax return done right.”

It’s complicated

Design is getting more complicated and rightfully so. We are complicated beings with shifting emotions that shape our experience. 

Everything we've learned these past two decades about our craft, our process, and our design philosophies have prepared us for the next stage of our growth as designers. Just as we learned to design experiences that adapted to different screen sizes and connections speeds, we need to learn to design for shifting human emotions. 

The lives of the people using the things we design change daily. The fear that comes with unemployment, the pain of losing a loved one, the anger of feeling excluded, and the constant stress of these uncertain times are environmental factors we can and should design for. 

More than designing for delight, we can design for all emotions. We spent the first twenty years of this century designing user experiences. Let's spend the next twenty years designing human experiences.

Interested in learning more about how to design for these complex times? Check out the new edition of my book Designing for Emotion from A Book Apart.