Design for Emotion

A great synthesis of a lot of psych research, brought into focus by articulating principles that can be deployed by designers.Each chapter integrates a lot of the literature, and shows how those findings are realized in concrete examples. The instances aren't full-blown designs, but rather snippets of visual phenomena. For example, there's a table showing different patterns of lines, with a brief guide to how those feel intuitively.Also of great value is Aaron Walter's concise, brilliant book, Designing for Emotion. His book exemplifies its message, and is extremely well written. If you need an excellent demonstration of how to go all the way toward a complete interaction design, Walter's book is the best I've found. It's a very detailed case study (focused on the charming service, MailChimp).The van Gorp book is more theoretical, and provides a wide-ranging review of the literature.

This book provides a quick and general review of design for emotion. If you want something that dives deeper, or provides summaries of articles, I would suggest another text.

A-OK

I came to the content of Design for Emotion with over 30 years committed to studying and teaching visual art, and 20 years working in art museums. While that makes me attuned to visual culture, this book opened my eyes to a universe of design principals, practices, and possibilities that I never imagined.The book draws upon the research of a broad range of experts, including renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio--who wrote Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. I didn't expect to find him in this book. Nor did I expect to find such a broad range of references to illustrate key points: including biker culture as evidence of the mammalian brain--which I now know is involved in our emotional responses to social interactions.I never knew there was such a thing as "Eustress" a positive form of stress that is good for performance. And it never occurred to me that when I'm working on my Mac, there's a reason why the power button is recessed, up in the right hand corner: so that I won't trigger it unintentionally.And one of my favorite examples of effective messaging was a refrigerator post-it that reads, "Don't Kill the Fish", which is intended as a reminder for daily feeding. Indeed, there were several aha moments in reading this book. My copy is dog-eared, with notes in the back.I know I will revisit Design for Emotion often. And true to its title, it is designed to bring out that emotion...to increase the likelihood that I will use this product. With concise sidebars, amusing anecdotes, great graphs and visuals, a summary conclusion to each chapter, and a wealth of references for further reading, this is a handbook for designing with emotion. I'll never think about product design, or look at the world the same way again.

The authors split up the book into the following chapters:1. Why design for emotion?2. What is emotion?3. When do we design for emotion?4. Where do we design for emotion?5. How do we design for emotion?6. Interviews & Case StudiesThe text is one of the better books on emotional design, and is generally very solid while other books I've read are lacking. Visuals and tables help support the author's points and make it feel that reading is not a slog at all. At some points, the text kind of dragged, but it was never so long that I had to skip entire sections. The general progression of the book logically made sense, I would recommend this book. If you are looking for an even quicker read about emotional design, look into Designing for Emotion by Aaron Walter. After reading this book, I felt more comfortable about applying the principles learned to my own work. If you are interested in direct application, I would not recommend Norman's Emotional design book as it's very theory based. I also feel that Norman's book went off track about halfway through when he starts to talk about robots through the end of the book.The bottom line: A good introduction with adequate examples and application to emotional design, those looking for a quicker read should look into Walter's Designing for Emotion.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I especially loved how the intro was written. The language used made me feel like the book was actually talking to me, and that connection continued throughout the book! It is a great vantage into the world of interface design. I would definitely recommend this book!

Are you a creative professional who designs consumer products, entertainment, software, websites, marketing and communications? If you are, then this book is for you! Authors Trevor van Gorp and Edie Adams, have done an outstanding job of writing a book that appreciates the importance of evoking emotions and communicating personalities to capture viewers' attention and create satisfying experiences.Authors van Gorp and Adams, begin by discussing the goals of designing for emotion and providing reasons why you should be considering emotional responses as part of the design process. In addition, the authors help you understand the basic dimensions of emotion and to predict how your design decisions will affect users' emotions. They then explain why some products become meaningful to users. The authors then, examine how design communicates emotion and personality to your users. Next, they introduce the A.C.T. model, which is a framework for addressing the users' emotional needs. Finally, the authors feature interviews and case studies from industry leaders researching and applying emotion to design.This most excellent book was written to help you create designs that do a better job of communicating emotion and personality to fulfill users' need. Perhaps more importantly, the authors explore how to practically apply these unconscious associations to express emotion and personality through design.

Excelente libro, recomendable para las personas que quieran aprender cómo diseñar experiencias. En un punto el libro se vuelve un poco repetitivo con algunos conceptos pero en general es muy interesante

As a User Experience professional I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Well-researched, engaging and informative, Adams and van Gorp have written a design reference book that is the perfect mix of practical and fascinating. After reading this book you will begin to reassess how you emotionally interact with products; even after the first few chapters how will begin to see how you can incorporate the principles introduced into your own designs.We used Design for Emotion as the subject of my user experience group's book club and I personally used it as the subject of a "lunch and learn" for my company. In both cases I was impressed with how quickly Design for Emotion generated meaningful conversations that led to real improvements in design process.Again, this book is fascinating and I would absolutely recommend it for all design professionals.