The theory defines Functionality as the UX layer responsible for task solving. In this article, however, I want to take a closer look at what task solving actually includes — and whether the other UX layers are, in fact, separate from the task, or whether they also contribute to solving it.
🧩 6 Layers of UX - A Framework for Design
In one of my latest articles, I discussed the UX pyramid — the six layers of UX. While being of great utility in the design process, it is essentially a checklist that helps us remember the different components of a good experience and their construction principles.
But the framework is made for us to design from, not to experience.
That is a great distinction.
When designing interfaces, we should therefore remember that all these layers ultimately contribute to making a task possible, understandable, efficient and engaging:
- ⚙️ Functionality makes the task possible.
- 🛡️ Reliability makes successful task completion dependable.
- 🧭 Usability makes the task understandable and executable.
- ✨ Convenience makes task solving easier and more suitable to the user's context.
- 💫 Pleasurability influences how the task feels while it is being performed.
- 🔗 Meaningfulness connects the task to what matters to the person performing it.
The layers are separated for the designer. For the user, however, they become one experience.
And that changes how we might think about task solving.
6 Layers of User Experience
🌐6 Layers of UX - One Experience
A person does not normally approach an interface thinking: Now I am going to experience the functionality layer, followed by reliability, usability and convenience.
They simply want to get something done.
The different qualities of the experience therefore merge into the task itself.
A reliable payment process does not merely provide reliability as a separate UX quality. It helps the customer complete the purchase with confidence. Usability does not merely make an interface pleasant to operate; it helps the person understand what to do. Convenience can determine whether the person chooses this particular platform for the task in the first place.
And pleasure and meaningfulness need not wait until the functional task is finished.
They can accompany the task while it is happening.
This is where emotion becomes interesting in design.
❤️ How Does Emotion Serve in Design?
🎯 Bringing Values, Goals and Desires into the Task
McCarthy and Wright identify four threads through which technology can be experienced: sensual, emotional, compositional and spatio-temporal.
What interests us here is the emotional thread.
Emotion in design is about more than making people happy. It is also about making sense of what we encounter and what it means to us.
This connects particularly well with the layers of Pleasurability and Meaningfulness.
People do not approach an interface as blank pages. They bring their own values, goals and desires into the encounter.
💎 Values
Values are the things a person considers important or worthwhile.
For an Adidas customer, these might include social status, belonging to a particular group, a healthy lifestyle, athletic performance or a particular aesthetic.
🎯 Goals
Goals are more immediate: what am I trying to accomplish?
For an Adidas customer, the immediate goal might simply be to buy a new pair of sports shoes.
✨ Desires
Desires are where the emotional dimension becomes particularly interesting.
The customer may need a new pair of sports shoes while also wanting self-expression, a particular lifestyle, social belonging or a certain image.
The task is therefore not necessarily as simple as buying shoes.
The customer is simultaneously making choices about what the product says, how it fits their life and how they want to feel about that choice.
People experience technology through what they value, what they are trying to achieve and what they desire.
And when we design the interface, we inevitably bring some of these dimensions forth through our choice of colours, typography, imagery, microinteractions, language and interaction patterns.
The emotional dimension is therefore not necessarily something added to the task afterwards.
It can be part of the task as it is experienced.
👁️ Choosing UI to Affect Customers' Choices and Perceptions
The way we dress or style our hair can signal something about us to the outside world. We might look professional, ready for a holiday or simply ready for bed.
The same principle applies to our digital interfaces.
Jeff Johnson, in Designing with the Mind in Mind, connects interface design with human perception, cognition, decision-making, attention, emotion, trust and habit formation.
The interface is therefore not merely a cosmetic surface.
The way it is designed affects how people perceive, understand, interpret and act upon a digital product or service.
This is why Adidas can deliberately choose graphical solutions that connect with motion, movement and sport in a particular way.
The interface is communicating something while the customer is performing a task.
It does not stop being an interface because it is also communicating a brand.
💬 Shaping Messages for Emotional Connection
The language and manners we use in everyday life affect the people around us in particular ways.
If we are rude or unwelcoming, people may pull away. If we are helpful and considerate, they may be more willing to continue the interaction.
The same is true of digital products.
The language we use affects how customers experience the interaction.
Consider a simple payment error.
“Payment failed.”
Technically, the message may be sufficient.
But it leaves the customer with several unanswered questions: What happened? Did I do something wrong? What should I do now?
Compare it with:
“We couldn't complete your payment. Please check your card details and try again.”
The second message does more than communicate an error. It explains, guides and gives the customer a next step.
The emotional quality of the interaction has therefore become part of its practical function.
Depending on the situation, an interface can be:
- 👋 inviting
- ⚠️ warning
- 🤝 reassuring
- 🧭 instructing
- 🙏 apologising
- ✅ confirming
- 🚫 refusing
- 💪 encouraging
- ❓ asking
- ℹ️ informing
These are not simply emotions. They are interactional roles.
Through them, an interface develops a particular way of behaving towards the person using it.
We could therefore say that an interface has an interactional personality — a particular way of relating to its users while helping them accomplish a task.
And this is where interface personality meets brand personality.
🎨 Brand Personality and Emotional Design
Brand personality naturally develops in relation to the customer segments and subcultures a brand is designed to serve. It therefore connects naturally to the emotional qualities we introduce into our digital design through UI, language, imagery and interaction.
Brand personality is not something we simply decorate a task with.
It can influence the way the task itself is approached, understood and accomplished.
This is where brand personality and emotional design can travel through all six layers of UX, while becoming particularly visible in the experiential dimensions of Pleasurability and Meaningfulness.
Jennifer Aaker's classic 1997 Journal of Marketing Research paper established a framework for brand personality based on five dimensions:
- 🌿 Sincerity
- ⚡ Excitement
- 🧠 Competence
- ✨ Sophistication
- 🏔️ Ruggedness
Her work demonstrated that consumers can perceive brands through human personality characteristics and that these characteristics can carry symbolic meaning.
In digital products, however, the personality does not remain somewhere outside the interface.
The interface has to communicate information, guide interaction and establish recognition within seconds.
So if part of our brand personality is “trustworthy and human,” the interface might need to be accommodating, helpful, supportive and reliable — not merely look that way.
The personality has to behave.
We might therefore think of the relationship as:
Brand personality → Interface personality → Interactional experience
The first defines something about who the brand is.
The second is how that identity behaves when it meets a person.
The third is what the person actually experiences.
And this is where the distinction between designing and experiencing becomes important again.
We can define a brand personality.
We can design an interface around it.
But the person using the interface is the one who experiences the result.
⚖️ Can Our Brand Personality Clash with the Task?
Brand personality and task solving create a fascinating bridge between marketing and UX.
But can the connection become a problem?
The brand wants to be itself.
The user wants the interface to work for them.
A playful brand might want a playful interface, while the user may be dealing with a serious problem.
A highly innovative brand might want an unconventional interaction, while the user simply wants to complete a familiar task.
A warm brand might want to sound human, while the user wants a precise answer.
The brand personality can therefore support the task — but it can also become friction if its expression starts competing with what the person came to accomplish.
Personally, I am not fascinated by the total experience provided by Figma.
The brand wants to stand out as edgy, while I might experience some of that edginess as unnecessary friction when I am simply trying to get something done.
The issue is not whether Figma should have a personality.
Of course it should.
The interesting question is what happens when that personality becomes too prominent for the task at hand.
The brand wants to be itself. The user wants the interface to work for them.
So the questions we, as designers, need to ask are:
- Should the UX be shaped entirely by brand personality, or should we accommodate other needs and expectations of our customers and users?
- How much of the brand's personality should survive the encounter with an actual human need?
I believe the correlation can be different from project to project.
And perhaps that is precisely why it is worth asking.
🌱 When Brand Personality Becomes Part of the Task
Perhaps we have been looking at brand personality from the wrong direction.
We often think of personality as something a brand expresses and a customer perceives.
But in a digital product, the brand has to do something.
It has to help us search, choose, compare, understand, decide, buy, solve, communicate or recover from an error.
And while doing so, it has to behave somehow.
That behaviour is experienced.
A brand can be serious, playful, warm, sophisticated, rebellious, reassuring or highly competent. But none of these qualities exist in isolation once the user arrives with an actual need.
The personality meets the task.
And the task meets a human being.
This is perhaps where emotional design becomes more interesting than simply designing for positive emotions. The question is not whether we can make an interface more delightful. It is whether the emotional and relational qualities of the interface help the person accomplish what they came to do — in a way that feels appropriate to the situation and meaningful to them.
The six layers of UX can help us analyse the construction.
But the person experiences the whole.
And somewhere between what the brand wants to be, what the interface needs to do, and what the human being actually needs, the real experience takes place.
That is where brand personality stops being decoration.
It becomes part of the task.
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