Every good design anticipates and accommodates users’ needs, responses, interactions - feel the design - experience design.
As a designer we focus on users’ needs, expectations, preferences, likes and dislikes. And when we look at these five terms - they all have something to do with emotions.
And it is obvious and logical that the functionality we design should help them achieve their goals as efficiently and effectively as possible. And even goals are goals and efficiency is not in touch with emotions at first glance - but finally they are - because if we are not happy about the goal and happy how we got there the experience will be not good - will be not motivating - as we should also have to focus on users' responses, which are naturally emotional.
As rational as we may like to think we are, emotions are at the heart of how we interpret reality, look at our private life and business.
Positive experiences drive curiosity. They help motivate us to grow as individuals.
Negative experiences help us prevent repeated mistakes.
Long story short - when I look at my career as interior decorator, interior designer upholstering furniture, sewing curtains, and decorating rooms; when I remember my years as architect and town planner designing building, planning and creating smaller or larger 'habitats' ; or since the New Media time my work as information-architect and now as UX designer - what ever we design we face emotions.
The fact is that the emotions and designing with having these emotions in mind - when we work on product or service - it will have affects and it will affect its success. Whether or not we want or like to realize it, users have sophisticated thought processes going on most of the time. So, we must address three levels of cognitive responses when we design (The first might sounds funny - but it is one of my most important one):
- First Impressions and Reactions - Designing for the gut-feeling - a first understanding or feeling which characterized by intuition or instinct rather than intellect - Users’ first impressions of something of the UI and design; e.g., an UI which is in order, looks familiar suggests ease of use.
- Then how it Functions - Users will do a subconscious and conscious evaluation of the design - whether and how it will help them achieving something - a task, get a step forward, achieving their goals, and how easily and effortlessly it will be. Aspect like feeling safe, satisfied, a feeling and emotion of being comfortable and under control, with minimum effort required.
- Third Perceiving Value - Reflective Design, once an user come across, faced and used the product, the design experienced the service - quite quickly the users will look at their emotions, experiences, actions, and responses - and the users will consciously judge its performance and benefits, including value for time, efforts and money. If they’re happy, it is likely that they’ll keep using it, form emotional bonds with it and tell their colleagues, and friends.
The reflective design is much more complex than the other two - as it is so many-faceted - some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Mercedes-Benz, Google, have rapidly adopted this part of emotional design and way of thinking and approach.
And in this context look or remember Don Norman's Book:
Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things
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