How Emotional Design Boosts Live‑Streaming Gift Revenue: A Practical Framework

Preface

Every person is a small universe of emotions; perception and actions are driven by feelings. Emotional experience influences behavior and cognition, yet research and application of emotional design are scarce, motivating the creation of an emotional design system.

Research Background

Previous 0‑to‑1 projects relied on experience. In the live‑stream dating product, emotional experience is a core need, so emotional design must be formally considered.

Research Approach

Extract Scene Emotional Indicators

We defined the live‑dating scenario and identified target users: single or divorced youths in lower‑tier markets using video live‑streaming for dating, passing time, and alleviating loneliness.

We refined coarse‑grained emotional indicators based on the Delft University positive emotion research, selecting five suitable metrics through discussions with designers, researchers, and product users.

Build Gift System Framework

We analyzed five leading competitor products, mapping gift quantity and emotional distribution across value dimensions, and identified emotional priorities.

We also examined competitors' emotional focus to inform our framework.

Validate Emotional Indicators

Through user interviews we segmented users into high, medium, and low spenders, establishing four user personas (leisure, pursuit, fan, group‑party), with leisure and fan types being core.

We compared interview findings with coarse indicators to confirm the emotional factors influencing the live‑dating scene.

Construct Emotional Gift System

We defined design language for each emotion to ensure consistency and accurate emotional expression in gifts.

We built a semantic intention library for gifts by analyzing existing gift data (price, quantity, consumption share, style) and conducting targeted brainstorming.

Conclusion

Combining user motivations and behavior data, we created an emotional gift intention library and design language for the live‑dating scenario, demonstrating significant revenue improvement after launch. Ongoing exploration of emotional design aims to further enhance user experience and commercial value.