Emotions navigator
A personal project to explore the nuances of human emotions and incorporate what I learn in my user research and product design work
“Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open entire universes.” — Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart
Brené Brown’s team surveyed over seven thousand participants over five years and found that, on average, people can only name 3 emotions. The most common ones were: happy, sad, and angry. Emotional granularity is our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions.
In my experience, the emotional granularity of product teams is limited. When describing how users feel, most would say that they’re frustrated, confused, or overwhelmed.
The Emotions Navigator
I wanted to build a more nuanced understanding of human emotions to understand better the feelings of the people I design solutions for. As a personal project, I’m building an interactive library of information about emotions called the Emotions Navigator.
Why? I started this work partly because I wanted to create a space where I could centralize what I continue to learn. However, it could one day help other people discover information about emotions and ultimately be able to more precisely identify and differentiate between them.
Visualizing related emotions
I also created this network graph to visualize how these emotions are connected. The research on this topic doesn’t seem definitive, so this is a draft. Hover over an emotion to reveal its information. The platform used for this tool, Flourish Studio, is a little finicky. As a result, some of the emotions overlap visually; you can drag emotion nodes around to see them more clearly.
Great… Now what?
Using what I had learned and with the help of these tools, I created an emotional profile for a recent project.
Sure, we all know the names of these emotions. But listening to users with this framework in mind allowed me to pick up of several key nuances and it helped build a solid foundation for conceptual ideation and style exploration. The image below shows my typical process and highlights where I was able to leverage these findings.