Emotional Design

Comments

David

Summary

In Norman's first book, The Design of Everyday Things, he stressed the necessity of usability in products of all forms. With a first glance at a device or product, the user should instantly know how the product is supposed to be used, without question; they should not have to read a lengthy manual to understand the inner workings of the product. In Emotional Design, Norman departs from this notion partially and instead focuses on the emotional appeal of objects. His main point (as quoted by William Morris) is as follows:

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or do not believe to be beautiful.

Norman's description of emotional design includes the following points:

• Users report that they are more happy with objects that are aesthetically pleasing, even if they do nothing or do not work as they are supposed to.
• Appeal to the three levels of emotional response:

Visceral: the basic appearance and visual / aural / haptic reponses to the object

Behavioral: the pleasure and effectiveness of use (does it work correctly?)

Reflective: how the object appeals to the user in a high-level, like self-image, personal

reflection, or past memories

• Make the object have its own unique personality.
• The object should be not only beautiful but 'fun' as well. Beauty, fun, and pleasure all work together to form a sense of enjoyment of the product or object.
• Products should go beyond the initial expectations, produce an instinctive reactionary response, and deliver surprising novelty.
• Communication between product and user should make the user feel important and respected.
• Machines or robots that are created should have emotional responses so as to react with humans appropriately.
• Allow the user to have a personal relationship with the product, either through customization, years of use, or personal touches.

In all, Norman wants us to take his past argument (that all products should be usable, even if they're ugly) and change the weights he had given before. He now believes products should be beautiful and emotionally pleasing as well as be usable and work correctly, for successful products have both of these qualities.

Discussion

I thought this book was a nice calm change from the style of The Design of Everyday Things. In that previous book, he seemed to be angry at everyone, continually telling everyone how their products are wrong because they are hard to understand or use, and that they focus too much on aesthetics instead of usability. What was nice about Emotional Design was that he instead focuses on instructing designers on great ways to make their objects and products more emotionally appealing, and gave examples of great emotional designs, instead of criticizing everyone and giving examples of poorly designed products. It was a much more satisfying read than the past.

I completely agreed with Norman on the necessity of designing with emotional and aesthetic appeal. Apple laptops and PCs are not successful because they are more powerful than any other PC (because they're not), but because they are beautiful to look at and to use. I have always wanted an Apple computer (though I can't afford one) even though I know that as a computer programmer, I would not have as many resources for developing applications and doing my daily work as I would on a PC. This shows that the emotional design of the computers can far surpass the functional requirements. I know that I definitely buy products based on aesthetic qualities as much as functional qualities.