In this video, Don Norman discusses the concept of emotional design, the subject of his book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.
One of things I learnt from this video is that everyday objects can easily affect us in an emotional way, consciously or not. They can do that in a variety of ways; the how they look, feel, function or the way they interact with us. For example, if a product functions perfectly well like a sharp pair of scissors but look horrendous or feel terrible in your hand then they’ll still create a negative emotion in your mind. But if an object functions perfectly well and looks and feels great then the chances are we’re going to like using this particular product.
Don Norman points out the fact that a well-designed product needs generate positive emotions in the consumer without having to over compensate in its functionality or appearance. The examples he used are the dashboards of several Mercedes-Benz and BMW vehicles. While attempting to gather more controls and combine them on an electrical screen, they leave drivers scratching their heads and fiddling with the computer screens.
“Take the front seats in my S550 test car, for example. You can easily spend 15 minutes fiddling with them before even putting the car in drive.”
As consumers wants more and more features in their cars, more buttons and controls need to be added to the cars. But it’s about how easy they are differentiated amongst each other or how easily they can be located and utilised. If there is a row of a dozen identical buttons with tiny symbols above each one, it is not going to be easy for the driver to find the right one while driving.
Norman points out that one of the challenges of our future is to successfully improve the functionality of products without making the process of using it much more complicated and time-consuming. This is what generates a positive emotional response in the consumer when using a product that not only functions well but is easy and fun to use.
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