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My name is Jiri Jerabek and I'm UX consultant and MSc student of Human-Computer Interaction with Ergonomics at UCL.This blog serves as a place to share my opinions, thoughts and notes on interaction design, user experience and HCI.
Category Archives: Emotions in Design
Emotional Design – Why we love (or hate) everyday things
When I began exploring the field of human-centered design, I was told to start with reading Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things – and I have to confess that all those who recommended this book were right. For me it was a breaking point, a milestone in my career.
After I finished reading The DOET, I started looking elsewhere – on books by Alan Cooper, Jeff Raskin and Dan Saffer, but soon I came across a nice review of another book by Donald Norman, Emotional Design – Why we love (or hate) everyday things.
Psychology in design is a huge theme today and while you can find tens of interesting articles advocating the emotion and user experience in design on the web, Norman’s Emotional Design was the most complete and enlightening summary I have read on the theme. It was also interesting to compare Norman’s and Cooper’s approach and I think the Emotional Design perfectly compliments what Cooper says about dancing bearware in his books.
Although the book is not such an eye-opener as The Design of Everyday Things, it’s still excellent and I believe every designer should have it on a shelf. Norman writes in plain language, uses lots of examples and refers to some quite enlightening researches.
If you are a designer and you haven’t read Emotional Design yet, please do yourself and your users a favour – get it and read it. Continue reading
Emotions in Design
Let me introduce you to a mini-series of articles on the importance of emotions in design.
Today, the approach to user interface and interaction design is still often steered away from using emotion as a tool for interaction between the user and the product and as one of the cornerstones of the user experience design.
The first software designers were those who possessed the knowledge how to write instructions in programming languages – developers, engineers and techy nerds. Naturally, they cared much more about the viscera of their products than about the emotions their creations can imply.
Though the early developers didn’t care about emotions too much (as many of them still don’t care today), every one of us experienced lots of different feelings when using their products. We all feel frustration and anger when dealing with rude and incompetent software as well as satisfaction when something goes smoothly and the product does exactly what we want. Continue reading
