There are many tools, methods and standards for measure the behaviors and digital interactions of users. These are tools that have logically become more sophisticated and have gone from measuring events to interpreting behaviors, tools that more recently even aspire to measure our emotions.
The desire to measure how users feel and get excited naturally inspires curious digital minds to ask a fundamental question: Can users’ emotions really be measured?
My opinion is no, and I explain why.
Today there are tons of software products that help the digital analyst in their efforts to measure performance. These tools help generate reports that are pulled, sliced, and segmented from multiple angles and dimensions; reports that share a common goal, a dream, we could say: know the value of any digital activity.
This quest to understand digital performance is a genuine and understandable goal, but before moving from the current ability to measure events to the grand ambition of measuring emotions, we should pause and reflect on the nature of what digital analytics has been able to unravel today.
Today’s analytics have successfully exposed the general and niche angles of online, supporting data-driven decision-making and offering the digital leader a guide to the myriad possible paths their ventures can take.
This success must be consistent, however, with inherited limitations. Any analytical report, like any form of scientific knowledge, offers approximations of reality and not absolute realities as is often believed.
In this framework of approximations to reality, Viewing digital data analysis and reporting as a source of absolute truth can do more harm than good, that is, assuming that an analytical report is the only source of truth, can hinder innovation, which requires counterintuitive and irrational ideas. In the end, no absolutely irresistible creation can be dictated by reason and logic alone.
In light of this, the answer to whether emotions can be measured can be answered twice, as two equal sides of the same thing that need each other: what is the objective that measuring emotions pursues and how to reach it.
There are multiple possible scenarios in the digital journey that a user undertakes, scenarios that provoke different emotions before, during and after the course of said journey, emotions that necessarily transcend traditional metrics like Conversion, given that emotions are in themselves the reason that makes us decide, they are the source of our intelligence and the link that unites or separates us with people, places or objects. Therefore, the goal of wanting to measure emotions is laudable.
As for how to achieve that goal, the key to success lies in understanding both the typology of emotions and their naturesomething that requires breaking disciplinary boundaries beyond the digital and delving into the world of neuroscience, neurobiology and of course the foundational aspects of these in philosophy and psychology, disciplines that have evolved extraordinarily in recent years and that nevertheless they are still unable to decipher with a minimum of certainty the complex corporeal and neurological mechanics in which our emotions originate.
On these premises, My recommendation is to change the order of the factors, placing the desire to measure emotions behind the ability to evoke them through creativity. In other words, putting imagination before data. given that, although it is impossible to measure emotions with a sufficient minimum of certainty, it is perfectly possible to use our creative intelligence to incite them through the use of images, shapes, interactions and movement elements that make up aesthetic and pleasant interfaces.
In short, knowing and wanting to know is of course praiseworthy, as is wanting to expand what is known and known from the perceptible to the emotional; however, when it comes to emotions, there is really a lot to talk about, beyond the data.
Image:
Stay informed of the most relevant news on our news channel
Facebook Comments
Disqus