Chapter 85. Can You Measure a Soul?
One common opinion in UX is the idea that you can’t measure feelings. That isn’t actually true, especially when we measure the feelings of a group.
A soul?!
Ok, ok... it may sound religious, but I am referring to the emotional, subjective parts of the human experience.
The soaring highs, the heartbreaking lows.
Call it whatever you want. It’s who we are.
Point is: can we measure it? Yes we can!
Feelings produce actions and decisions, and those things can be measured pretty easily.
Neuromarketing
In UX, we usually don’t have an fMRI machine in the office, but just as an example: there is an emerging industry that measures brains to discover which version of an ad or a movie creates the strongest emotions.
It’s essentially an A/B test, (you will learn more about A/B tests in Chapter 95) with much cooler data than we usually get. When you do an A/B test, you are doing the same thing, but using actions instead of brain scans as your evidence.
Groups Are Reliable; Individuals, Not So Much
As we learned in Chapter 16–Chapter 21, motivations (feelings) make people do stuff. Actions.
You might “Like” a photo, retweet an article, or embarrass yourself in front of millions of people because 50 people said you should try to swallow a spoonful of cinnamon.
In UX, our goal is to create actions, not just feelings. We motivate people so they will act in a certain way, which is helpful for everyone (including us).
When we measure individual people, we have to ask them face-to-face; ...
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