Adding Emotion to your UX Writing

By David Pfeiffer and Meghan Pfeiffer

As often discussed in UX articles, triggering an emotional response is a key aspect of call-to-action compliance. Pictures and novel design elements are the low-consideration primer of choice. A picture and title may get you the share or bookmark, but large ticket items require copy that completes the overall emotional experience towards becoming a customer.

This article will outline a tried-and-true emotional writing technique used by fiction writers.

The Psychological Anatomy of a Web Page

Below is a diagram used to illustrate how Persona attributes can influence a section of the page. Each long scroll web page section presents the user with a frame of reference (a.k.a. scene) for the overall story being told on the page, which typically consists of:

Pinned header (global navigation)
Hero Banner – Where the target persona is highlighted.
A number of alternating background colored content frames or sections. Each consisting of
- Low consideration hook – typically a title and/or an image or graphic. This grabs the attention of the visitor.
- Scannable Body copy – a grow / protect emotional trigger in the form of text. This element has to engage the visitor’s imagination to entice them to click to satisfy a protect (e.g., scarcity) or grow (e.g., curiosity) feeling.
- Optional Call-to-Action (CTA) or Decision frame – a path to the next page in the journey design or to continue scrolling.

Section design patterns on a simple Long-scroll page

The focus of this article is on the emotional body copy that motivates the click, because even when the visitor is drawn to the paragraph body, the conversion is not guaranteed. We need to nudge the user towards the desired action. Even in scannable web copy, we can deploy emotional hooks to bring about empathy to our message.

Additional Resources

5 Things That Make People Click On Content

5 Things That Make People Click On Content | Blog | Whatagraph

59% of the people who share your content will never even look at it. They’ll never actually click through. See how to change that with these proven tricks.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness [Thaler, Richard H., Sunstein, Cass R.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

selective-focus-portrait-photo-of-woman-in-red-t-shirt-3148937

Emotional Copywriting

If you have ever written and refined a fiction story that people care about, you would find yourself concerned about communicating the emotion of your characters. As simple as it may sound, the goal of the author is to get the reader engaged in the story to the point where they feel what the character feels. If you tell people how a character feels, your readers would tell you the scene was “flat” or “I didn’t care about…” But how could that be? You knew what the character was feeling, so where was the disconnect?

Emotions are an Internal state that must be communicated via nonverbal, and/or verbal expressions and personalized to affect transfer to another. If your reader is not feeling it, you may have violated the two basic rules of emotional transfer in storytelling:

Show, don’t tell – Although “show, don’t tell” is usually discussed in the context of a story’s plot, this axiom applies to emotional communication as well. If I simply tell you “I feel mad,” rarely would that make you mad as well. You would need more context to empathize with me.
It takes time and imagery to rev up emotions – time and imagery provides the audience with opportunities to access similar experiences to build a relationship between them and the message. This process takes at least 15 seconds (about 60 words). This seems like a long time considering how many people scan things quickly, but if the paragraph is structured correctly, even the “scanner” will engage with the slower pace of the message. It’s what some writers call “pacing the narrative.”.

Now consider most ad copy that you read. Does it make you feel anything? You probably find yourself just blowing past most of it, right? So let’s dive into one technique to increase the emotional quality of your writing via a simple formula.

woman-in-gray-shirt-lying-on-a-bed-3865664

Learning from Fiction Writers

This article will overview one of the many techniques in his book “The Emotional Craft of Fiction” by Donald Maas, as it can be easily applied to web copywriting. Mr Maas is a longtime fiction author and writing teacher.

This method, credited to Daphne Du Maurier, uses a simple four step emotional formula:

After labeling the emotion,

provide an analogy,
alternatives,
moral judgment, and
then justification.

In her book, “My Cousin Rachel” (1951), rather than simply saying what her character feels, Du Maurier describes why there are no real alternatives to what they feel. This acts as a guide to the emotion that the reader should feel as well. Let’s dive deeper into the method to mine the real gold of the “third level emotions.”.

Before demonstrating the Du Maurier approach, let’s look at some samples of typical ad / web copy that uses a cost-benefit approach to persuasion.

The Reasons-to-Believe Benefits Formula

This section will attempt to illustrate the technique in a real world web copy situation for screened-in porch products on a home-improvement website. Here are a series of cognitive-oriented “reasons-to-believe” / “cost-benefit analysis” lead-in paragraphs from two real home improvement websites.

“Decks and patios are great for when the weather is clear and warm; but wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy them year round? By creating a screened porch, you’re opening that outdoor space for your use all year long, which means you’re getting more out of your home—and that’s a goal everyone should aim for. Even if you don’t have an existing porch to screen, adding a screened porch to your home is simple, and easily one of the more cost-effective ways of getting to enjoy the outdoors from the comfort of your porch.”
“Picture your family enjoying a relaxing meal, or throwing a small party for the neighbors in the comfort of your new screened porch. Adding a screened porch to your home provides ample benefits, including increased home value, added space, and a place to enjoy the outdoors free from the elements, sun and insects.”

The Neuroscience Way

Both paragraphs above are “tried-and-true” and well written. But as we have learned from neuroscience, we decide emotionally first and then look for reasons to justify our decisions.

Therefore the emotional proposition should proceed the rationalization (cost-benefits analysis). Certainly emotion could be primed with the pictures of people enjoying the screened-in porch, as it should be. But now couple these pictures with an emotional lead-in to complete the story, making the reasons-to-believe all the more effective.

Additional Resources

Predictably Irrational

By Dan Ariely Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five c…

Buyology

Books by Martin Lindstrom - Official Site - Small Data & Buyology Books

Business Transformation | Branding Expert | Keynote Speaker

Pre-Suasion

Pre-Suasion - A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

In the book Pre-Suasion, social psychologist Robert Cialdini shines a light on how effective persuasion can happen moments before a message is delivered.

Getting to the Third-Level Emotions – the Du Maurier Approach

Here is the development process as outlined by Maas (1st column) and some thoughts from the authors on the screened-in porch example (2nd column).

Step	Example
Imagine a moment when your persona would feel something strongly.	My favorite experience is sitting on the porch. Looking out over the field in my backyard, cool summer breeze in the shade and no freaking bugs, no worry about sunburn.
Identify the feeling.	Tranquil satisfaction, no need to worry about bugs or sunburn.
What else would your persona feel at this moment?	The feeling of being on vacation where you have no cares about the past, today or tomorrow’s problems at the office.
Now begin to work with lower-layer emotion.	Examine it in four ways.
1) Objectify it by creating an analogy What does it feel like to have this feeling?	It’s like you just started your 2nd day of vacation in a far away place, the office problems are behind you and there are enough left in the vacation so there is no need to anticipate your return to the office. It’s a moment entirely detached from your stressful routine.
2) Make a moral judgment about it: Is it good or bad to feel this? Why?	This is a good feeling, you deserve it for all the hard work during the week and the weekends working on the yard.
3) Create an alternative: What would a better person feel instead?	Maybe some people would feel uneasy about enjoying this or how much the screened-in porch cost.
4) Justify this feeling: It’s the only possible thing to feel at this moment and here is why.	Not me, it is an earned moment, fully paid for by my effort and good fortune.
In your mind, look around the scene. What is your persona seeing that others don’t? Add one detail that only your persona would see in his own unique way.	Birds chirping, a wasp flies up to the screen and lands on it, no cause for concern.

Maas states, “An important part of this method is the lengthy discourse that I mentioned. Why delve so deeply? One reason is to create a longer passage for the reader. That in turn creates a period of time, perhaps fifteen seconds, for the reader’s brain to process. That interval is necessary. It gives readers the opportunity to arrive at their own emotional response, a response that we cannot know.”

Daphne du Maurier

Example

Every day is a mini vacation in your screened-in porch!

Imagine sitting inside your new screened-in porch. You feel the cool breeze of the summer day across your face. You take a sip from your favorite drink, then close your eyes to take in the moment of peace. You notice the sound of the wind and birds chirping. It brings to mind the cool shade of the beach house on your last summer vacation, a place where everything is in balance.

This moment makes the cost of the screened-in porch and installers worth every penny. And this experience is waiting here everyday to relive in private and with company – cool, peaceful, no hot sun, and no bugs!

Commentary

The experience of peaceful satisfaction is now associated with the ownership of a screened in porch.

Why does it work?

Maas says it this way (in story speak):

“…readers fundamentally want to feel something, not about your story, but about themselves. They want to play. They want to anticipate, guess, think, and judge. They want to finish a story and feel competent. They want to feel like they’ve been through something. They want to connect with your characters and live their fictional experience, or believe that they have.”

Conclusion

Did you find the Du Maurier paragraph more interesting than the “reasons-to-believe” paragraph? Did you experience any of the peaceful satisfaction associated with the ownership of a screened-in porch?

To see if the empathetic rewrite had a positive effect, we went to Mechanical Turk and hired 32 people to read the two candidate paragraphs and tell us which they thought would motivate them to keep interacting with the website. Here are the results:

Survey of Screened-in Porch web page lead-in paragraphs. In the real survey, the entire candidate paragraph was visible.

NOTE: The ordering of the paragraph choice was randomized to account for priming effects, no pictures or headlines were used in the test.

As you can see in the above pie-chart, the Du Maurier lead-in (red) was preferred 66% of the time. This bias towards the Du Maurier lead-in was significant given the subjective nature of the test. On a real website, we would A/B test the two paragraphs to see which converted better.

In conclusion, persuasion requires more than just walking people through your reasons-to-believe, it requires curating an emotional state that results in action. To maximize effectiveness, it would be useful to know your persona’s preferences and life experience profile to make the text even more relatable.

If you would like to submit your version of the exercise, please feel free to post it in the comments.

There are many other fiction writing and storytelling techniques that could be applied to web copy, so let us know if you would like to see more articles like this.

Co-Author Bio:

Meghan Pfeiffer, UX Writer and Designer

Meghan is in the process of earning a bachelor’s degree in Information Science and Technology from UW-Milwaukee. She is currently working as a UX design intern.

The younger Co-author and her big sister in the screened-in porch

Comments

Email me at: david@jondpfeiffer.com

Contact Me: jondpfeiffer@gmail.com