Emotional design

Don Norman on 3 ways good design makes you happy

In this video, design critic- Don Norman names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed. He tells me a good design should make users happy through looking at its beautiful appearance, touching comfortably; making sure it’s functional and also willing to buy it.

In his 13 min talk, He firstly emphasize that his new life is trying to understand what beauty is about, and pretty, and emotions. He showed an example, which is a global cutting knife made in Japan, there are three feature it has. First of all, its shape makes people wonderful to look at. Second of all, it's really beautiful balanced it holds -- feels well. Third of all, it's so sharp and it just cuts. It's a delight to use as well. So this cutting knife is both beautiful and functional. Another example is, Hiroshi Ishii and his group at the MIT Media Lab took a ping-pong table and a projector above it, and on the ping-pong table they projected an image of water and fish swimming in it. And as you play ping-pong, whenever the ball hits part of the table the ripples spread out and the fish run away. Although it’s not a good way to play Ping-pong, it is exactly fun.

Look at Google, when you type in some random words, they got thousands even millions of results. Instead of saying it, they just give you as many O's as there are pages. Norman also gave us a wonderful experiment which was done by a psychologist called Alice Isen. He said“It turns out that when you're anxious you squirt neural transmitters in the brain, which focuses you makes you depth-first, And when you're happy(called positive valence),you squirt dopamine into the prefrontal lobes, which makes you a breadth-first problem solver you're more susceptible to interruption, you do out of the box thinking.” So he thinks the brain works differently and if you're happy, things will work better than ugly ones.

Finally, he suggests that when people perceive designed objects, they always respond in three levels of emotions. The first one is called visceral level (biology, we like or dislike), the middle level of processing is the behavioral level (feeling in control, which includes usability, understanding, feel and heft) and reflective level is the third level (pit one emotion to another). That’s all things I learned from Norman’s talk. It changes my way to think of good design and it’s really helpful to me.