Why is Nicola so passionate about Emotional Design?

“My own journey with Emotional Design started over 20 years ago in England whilst leading a national programme to reduce waiting times for specialist drug and alcohol services. Data told us that, having waited a very long time for an appointment, people often didn’t attend or dropped out of treatment early. Traditionally, this was put down to poor client motivation. But when I explored this pattern more deeply, I learned that a person’s emotional journey through the healthcare system was just as important as their physical journey. To add value to our Lean process mapping, I created a tool called Emotion Mapping. This helped us to identify touch points along the physical journey that triggered significant emotions – positive or negative. Not surprisingly, we learned that people were more likely to engage in treatment and achieve better outcomes when the services they experienced provoked positive feelings such as safety, trust, respect, empathy and hope. This meant that, rather than speeding the process up, it was more important at stages to slow it down”.

Emotion Mapping also highlighted other important improvement opportunities. These included a) the need to align different parts of the health care system to operate towards common goals and b) for leaders to see and bridge the ‘how’ gap between aspirational corporate values and the real frontline experiences of clients and staff.

With the recognition that optimum end-to-end pathway and systems design takes more than Lean and Six Sigma, Emotion Mapping spread rapidly across the UK NHS. Today it is widely applied by a broad range of health, social and civic organisations around the world.