The first book I read of Don Norman was his The Design of Everyday Things, recommended by my UX design instructor. As a huge admirer of Apple products, knowing Don Norman was the vice president of Apple made me very curious and interested about his books. After read The Design of Everyday Things, I decided to take more advantage of his knowledge and wisdom in product design.
Emotional Design is not so much about digital design but more of homeware designs, such as the example of different teapots Norman gave in the beginning of this book. He revised some of his early viewpoints in The Design of Everyday Things that inclined to usability， cognition and utility whereas emphasized the importance of aesthetics and taking users’ emotions into consideration.
Norman states that there are three aspects to consider when design to leverage the love or hate of something: visceral, behavioural and reflective. Visceral design refers to the emotional bonds between the object and the user. For example, an old grandfather film camera that doesn’t work anymore does mean more than a featureless camera in the eye of the owner. This could be extended to “power of branding”, which distinguishes one brand from the others even though they resemble in features, usages, occasions… The point of visceral design is for designers to get inside user’s head by managing their emotions, generating internal triggers and changing the attitude.
Behavioural design is improving performance by to cater to the user’s physical habits. When we talk about behavioural level, we are talking about the emotions we experience when we about to accomplish a task but not yet. Positive emotions come up when we use little effort or consciousness to finish a task while negative emotions tend to appear when we are restricted or have huge difficulties to conduct the action.
Reflective design, lastly, is about how do user feel about themselves and how they want others to look at them when they use the product. This is the most superior level of emotional design, representing that we are consciously approaching a design, leveraging its advantages and drawbacks according our more nuanced and rational side, and to extract information to decide its meaning to us as individual. For example, even if the new series designs launched by renowned luxury brands are criticized by the masses, or are hunger marketing too much, there will still be a large number of customers rushing to them. Because they care more about how their friends think of them than the product itself when they wear the hottest release.
I am only at the very initial pages of this book, and some of the views above is what I previewed from other articles on Norman’s three levels of design. I will keep reading and updating my thoughts on it in my blog and to see how I am inspired by Don Norman, again.
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