What is the inspiration behind this project?
“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 our experience, the emotional granularity of product teams is limited. When describing how users feel, most would say that they’re frustrated, confused, or overwhelmed.
How are emotions related to one another?
This network graph is an early attempt to visualize how different emotions relate to one another. The research in this area is still evolving, so consider this a draft. The tool we’re using—Flourish Studio—can be a little finicky, which is why some emotion nodes might appear overlapping. You can drag them around to explore more clearly.
As designers, it’s important that we try to understand the emotions users are actually feeling—not just broadly, but with as much nuance as possible.
Is someone stressed, or overwhelmed? Anxious, or excited? Bored, or confused? These can look similar on the surface, but they’re not the same—and each might call for a different response in how we design. Because we’re not always trained to think about these differences, they can be easy to miss.
This analytical approach toward emotions, using for instance a map like the one below, helps us pause and question our assumptions as we try to name what users might be going through—and, in doing so, design with greater empathy and precision.
And now what?
The Emotions Navigator is a work in progress—an ongoing effort to explore the rich and complex world of human emotions. As we continue learning from researchers and experts, the site will grow and evolve.
Our hope is simply to spark curiosity. We believe that gaining a clearer understanding of emotions can make a difference—not just in our personal lives, but also in how we design for others.
Digesting and centralizing valuable and useful information about each emotion takes time. This is very much a long-term project, so thank you for your patience as we gradually document and share what we’re learning.