Emotional Pattern Programming. What??

I was talking to a woman from IBM the other night while I was at a party, and I was explaining to her about Emotional Pattern Programming (EPP). Obviously she didn’t know what it was, as it is only new. It is it the point where you program an action into a program that will trigger an emotional response. So if you want to get a user to perform an action based on an emotion, then you have to set the emotion before the action can be carried out.

How do you program EPP though? Or where are examples of it? Well first off you need to understand human emotions and human states. After all the human brain is a computer with many function or programs, for instance love is a program or function that is run whenever you meet someone you love. You perform various actions that have been programmed into you when are around that person, i.e. caring, etc.

Examples of it are everywhere! Amazon do it to a degree. They do it differently though, they hope that a person is in a buying state before they apply an Emotional Pattern. So they wait until they have put something in their shopping basket before they really push for other books to buy (They do it throughout the user browsing, but they wait until the Emotional Pattern is fully induced before they really push it). They do it by suggestions of what other people have bought with your book. This is highly effective because the person is already in a Emotional Pattern of purchasing!

You see this in other mediums and methods not just on the net. A classic example is Maccas, when you finish your order they used to ask-Not too sure if they still do I think they ask, “Is there anything else?” now- “would you life fries with that?” 9 out of ten people would say yes as they are in the Emotional Pattern of Ordering, Not purchasing yet! If you were to ask them that question, “Would you like fries with that?” when they were in the Emotional Pattern of purchasing 9 out of 10 people would say no.

It is an absolute without a doubt fascinating topic, which I think is going to take off in the next couple of years.

Like I say to everyone now, “The information age is over, it is the emotional age now!”. If you don’t believe me let me tell you how I have come to this conclusion. On your home page do you have iGoogle or myYahoo! do you have everything that you like emotionally or do you have everything you don’t like emotionally? Well the answer is going to be you have everything you like emotionally. Why would you have something on your site that you don’t like? You seek out what you like emotionally, hence the emotional age! If you still don’t believe me, have you heard of the term Emos. They are people with pitch black hair and maybe pink highlights with mascara. They believe the world is a terrible place and everyone is out to hurt them, in other words they are emotional. In the next ten years these people will be entering the work force. That means the work force that we know right now will change to an emotional workforce. There are hundreds of indicators to see how this new emotional age is formulating.

So we need to understand emotions to create better results for ourselves as developers. That is where EPP comes in.

What do you think? Tell me if I am wrong or tell me if I might be a little bit right. I would love you feedback!

August 4, 2008
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