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.

Emotional Design summary

Whereas The Design of Everyday Things discussed the pitfalls of badly designed products that are difficult to use and that can create frustration or – in worst scenarios – even accidents, in Emotional Design Donald Norman focuses on how we love (or hate) the things that surround us, as well as on the importance of emotion in design and product development.

Three levels of emotional affection

Norman starts with a few stories about his favourite objects and uses them to illustrate how different design influences emotions, use and experiences with the objects.

Norman divides the emotional affection into three levels – visceral, behavioural and reflective. The visceral level is initiated by the primary sensual perceptions – the appearance, sound, smell or even taste. The behavioural level reflects our immediate experience while using the product – if it is easy and pleasurable to use. Finally, the reflective level arises as a result of our observations of past experiences, of what we consider desirable and if the product can give us sense of achievement and self-esteem.

Pleasant things work better

However strange and unscientific that may sound at first, it is true. Visually appealing and nice does not mean unusable. People actually prefer using lovely things and aesthetically pleasant objects indeed let you work better. Norman presents interesting results of research studies on direct comparison of ATM’s user interface.

Decision = Logic + Emotion

Popular belief often disqualifies emotionally influenced decisions as inferior to the rational decisions supported only by logic. The truth is that emotions are crucial for our decision-making.

Emotions are part of our genetic and cultural inheritance and as such they are indivisible part of our cognitive process. The emotions corresponding to what is good, what is bad, what is pleasurable and what we dislike are result of long development and evolution. Some of those emotions are culturally influenced, some are similar to everyone.

Again, Norman shows results of research study on decision-making process of persons who, due to a brain damage, are emotionally impaired. The conclusion is clear – without help of emotion, the decision-making process is much more complicated. Actually, few of the emotionally impaired people were not able to even come to a conclusion.

Design with emotions in mind

Norman explains that emotions help us solve problems – happy people are more creative and will overcome problems more easily. Also, people emotionally attached to a subject will forgive it some of its usability flaws more easily than those note emotionally affected.

Every object (or service) should be designed with either positive or negative emotions in mind. Whereas some things need to be designed to make the usage fun, other objects designed to be used under pressure need to help the user to focus on a task.

Even though some reviews dismiss few last chapters on Emotional Machines and The Future of Robots as not very relevant, I really enjoyed reading them. Maybe because I’m a big fan of Lt. Cmdr. Data, or maybe because I was trying to absorb Norman’s theories in sense of making the interfaces I’m designing more emotional.

Although some of the Norman’s predictions look like already surpassed, I found the chapter about emotional robots really thought-provoking, especially when I was thinking about connection between Asimov’s laws of robotics and the artificial emotions.