People only feel 6 core emotions. Make them feel one more.

Marketing expert Seth Godin says there are only six emotions. Wiki list and background here.

Some things I hear when people look at this list:
So most emotions we can experience are negative? Only 1 out of 6 are purely positive? What about emotions like jealousy, envy, hate or love? But aren’t we mostly happy people? So life is a tragedy, not a comedy?

Aside from my philosophical disagreements to those reactions (I believe life is ‘worth it’, that happiness is only real when shared, and that happiness is the signal in the noise of all other emotions we’re constantly distracted by) this list, when taken without context or a lot of background research can be confusing.

I’m a product person by day, so for this post I’m isolating and viewing these six emotions through that lens.

To build a product that, as 37Signals discusses, is signal (happiness) from noise (all those other bad emotions), you must really understand all of these emotions and how to tap into or avoid them.

Also, there is one one key emotion people must experience that lies underneath happiness, but cannot be overstated in product development: power.

People should feel powerful with your product. For example, what are we really saying when we use these products?

I could go on with this list, but the point is that when we feel powerful we’re happy. We have control and we get signal when the rest of our lives are noise.

Therefore people need simple tools to feel powerful and happy, so never confuse power with more tools. Disagree? How many people have told you they love Excel? Hate Excel?

Next time you’re looking at your product backlog ask yourself: does any of this stuff make people feel powerful?

 
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