Below are a dump of unfinished notes, read them at your peril.
I'm going to write something proper about this book because it's got a really useful lens that feels relevant to lots of things I work on - UX design, advertising, architecture etc.
Don't hold your breath though.
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One of the best books I finished last year was Emotional Design - Why we Love (or hate) everyday things by Don Norman. It's a lesser known follow up book to his influential [[The Design of Everyday Things]].
He describes the Design of Everyday Things as part of his crusade against unusable objects. The purpose of this book, Emotional Design, is to reflect his campaign for beauty.
The book aims to explain why we love (or hate) everyday things - even when they're ostensibly designed for the exact same purpose. He urges designers to think about their creations beyond their basic function.
The main concept he drives home in the book is that there are three aspects to emotional design - which I'll call the three responses - the visceral, the behavioural and a reflective.
[[Visceral response]] is more like a reaction. Your intuitive gut feel about the experience. This happens fast and typically concerns aesthetics, but there's also a role for the other senses, particularly sounds and smells. A visceral response tends to be quite primal and thus two-dimensional. Like or dislike. Seek out or avoid. Friend or foe. Safe or unsafe.
- Norman goes into to the cognitive science of emotions but there's one thing thing he doesn't mention. Humans appear to have two different centres of the brain for Pleasure Seeking and Pain Avoidance. This means we're one of the few animals that can viscerally experience pleasure and pain at the same time. Eating hot chilli's and BDSM come to mind. (Not necessarily at the same time.)
- Fun fact, there is a saying in rollercoaster design that goes something like "fear minus death equals fun".
[[Behavioural Design]] has to do with the pleasure and effectiveness of use. Typically how we interact with the experience - how well does a teapot pour, does this film keep our attention, is the app easy to use. Really good behavioural design typically reduces the friction This is the response many UX designers spend a lot of time tweaking and improving.
[[Reflective Design]] is how we think about the experience - can we tell a story about it, what does it say about who we are, how do we rationalise it. Our reflective response is very concerned about our identity, how we perceive ourselves and how we are perceived by others. What does going to see my favourite sports team say about who I am? What does buying a terraced house say about me? What kind of person wears a watch like that?
What's important to get across is that though they are distinct aspects of a design, it's not possible to have a design without all three. They are interwoven whether the designer has considered them or not. So while some products might be better on a visceral level, they still have behavioural and reflective components, and visa versa.
What strikes me as useful about labelling the three responses is it becomes easier to break down and give feedback on any piece of creative work.
As someone who's worked in advertising, product design and user research - it feels like a mental model I could've done with earlier.
In this post I'll give some examples of how this lens in practise and explain why I now think I understand what a [[guilty pleasure]] is.
"It's impossible to build a watch that only tells time"
- Apple Watch image
- Casio
- Slow Watch
Above are three watches, all ostensibly designed to do the same thing - help you tell and keep track of time. But that's not all they tell about you about the wearer.
In fact, the same person might own these three watches. But they might choose to wear the Apple Watch when they're at work, the Casio when they're Slow watch at a party and they m choose to wear the Apple Watch The visceral response might be better called
Wine example:
- Wine from Supermarket
- Wine from Supermarket in a heavy bottle
- Wine from Supermarket you stole from the backstage changing room of your favourite cult band.
Misc
- But if you want to understand the Behavioural design of something, you have to watch people in context of the experience - see how they use the product, walking through the supermarket, or how they play a game.
- The best way to understand people's visceral response is to measure their biology, or neurochemistry, or have sophisticated emotional facial recognition software - because simply asking people how they feel is very unreliable - as the ad man [[David Ogilvy]] said "The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say"
- To counter this, really great artists have a knack for paying attention to their own gut feel, and anticipating their audience's. What becomes more difficult is sharing this information with someone else. And in a professional setting saying "something doesn't feel right about this - I don't think they'll like it" is frowned upon unless you have the authority to make that judgement call.
- Great artists consider the visceral, behavioural and reflective response to their product, service, experience intuitively - which is why they often seem to outsiders irrationally obsessed with irrelevant details of their craft.
Diesel didn't design their stores to be user friendly - they wanted people to ask for help, so their customers would interact with their staff - who were no doubt attractive and edgy.
Another example of a big brand allegedly making their product hard to use is Snapchat. Around 2017 they did a big update to their UI that meant almost everyone in my age group stopped using it. Friends even talked about it at parties about how "the new update is rubbish" and they now preferred Instagram. What happened here wasn't a mistake - it was the equivalent of a club playing loud music so that the old people would leave. Snapchat wanted to maintain their position as the dominant social app for teens so they made it different enough to annoy most of their users in their mid-twenties.
Alcohol - if you're British, the first time you tried alcohol was in your teens. And if you're honest, you thought it was viscerally disgusting. Strong or bitter beverages are often described as an acquired taste, since when you're young your taste buds haven't developed (or haven't been damaged enough) to like the taste yet.
