Due to the enormous increase of information in our society, it is not a surprise that our future is getting more and more complex. Every day we face a greater amount of information and challenges. Customers will stop perceiving and understanding a lot of available information, as the half-life of information seems to decrease by half every year. It is increasingly difficult to understand the scope of technology and functionalities and likewise, it gets more difficult to compare or select from an available product range.
I am often confronted with the question, “which laptop is currently state-of-the-art and is the best performing product?” An easy-to-answer question? If you are not keeping up with the latest developments, processors and details, it can be quite tough to determine which model to choose.
Let’s simplify this question by looking at the people, who pose it. Most often people who ask me for this advice need a solid office product, want to surf the web and write emails. We can match these requirements with the technical performance of current notebooks. It is safe to say that virtually every laptop currently on the market will meet these requirements. Was it difficult to find this answer?
For this reason, the simplification of information will be further integrated into our daily lives. Nevertheless, it will still be possible to counteract. I will show you how to design information for the target audience in an intuitive, receivable, simple and emotional way making it brain-conform.
Information always has an end, as information is comprised solely of bits and bytes. Emotions only arise in our minds and only through emotions is our interest peeked. For this reason all information needs to be either
1. Simple
In order for people to pick it up and understand it instantly. This holds especially true for products, processes and services in our everyday work lives, as work needs to be done in an efficient and rapid manner. User hurdles entail inefficiency. Simplicity is also key in advertising — the target audience has to understand and process the message within seconds. Or:
2. Emotional
There must be emotion in order for people to feel addressed and motivated. This is of particular importance and touches the areas of marketing, advertising and general design of information. The first impression is critical when it comes to the ultimate purchase decision.
In fact, whenever emotional needs are addressed, information also has to be simple in order for it to be directly perceived. This leads us to:
3. Simple and Emotional
Let’s draw our attention to an important fact: We cannot spark emotions or direct interest for our information within other people. Such interest is always self-motivated and peeks within the respective person looking at the information. For this reason we can only create the conditions and the right setting to evoke emotions and spark interest.
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If you are single and are being offered, via an advertisement, an engagement ring on Facebook, you will hardly notice the advertisement.
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A newsletter that will not fit into your field of interest will most likely be deleted before you have even perceived the entire subject line, or will lead to an immediate un-subscription, if you open it.
Through simplicity in processes and emotionality, motivation is triggered within us, or in many cases demotivation and the consequent ‘information blindness’ can be circumvented.
Our brain only works through motivation and interest.
We work, think, become creative and propose solutions for everyday situations or for professional applications.
– We all are capable of learning, but inconvincible;
– We all do not learn when we have to learn, but when we want to learn;
– We change our behavior only, When we choose to do so ourselves,
– And when we see the actual reason.
to sum things up …
SIMPLE = Reducing to the essentials within the context of experience of tasks, in order to enable us to process information more rapidly (Usability).
or
EMOTIONAL = Creating connections in order to store information more easily and facilitate the conversion into long-term memory (Experience).
When both areas are combined, we refer to the “User Experience” or “Customer Experience” of products, services or even entire businesses when these connotations get integrated into the overall corporate strategy. Given that completely different job profiles have arisen within these areas, looking at these two concepts in greater detail and discussing the differences is essential. This is paramount in order to grasp the connections and linkage between the various subject areas.