Reflection 3 — Book Reflection
The book that I chose to read is “Emotional Designs — Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things” by Donald A. Norman. This book describes the close relationship between the design of a product and the emotions that it evokes within its consumers. It also describes the process in consumer behaviors, how emotions are intertwined with cognition and how we could use these theories and consider these processes in our designs for different consumer types. Norman structured the book in two major sections: the emotional theory behind consumer behaviors and the practical application of these theories in our design process. Norman first pose the argument that emotions should never be considered separately from consumer’s rational decisions and behaviors by providing extensive examples, then he goes into the every applications and case studies where emotional designs have been used in the past and suggests future implications for emotional design in robots and machines. This book provides a stable foundation for designers that want to consider a more consumer-centric approach in their designs by combining consumer behavior theories and actual design applications and processes.
Initially when I chose this book, I was intrigued by the title. To me, the term “emotional design” suggested that the book would be about how different products were developed or designed to evoke a certain state of mind or mood in their consumers, which might lead to the consumer liking or despising the product. I was expecting a breakdown of how different emotions should be factored into the design of each product, for example, how happiness should be considered when creating children’s toys by adopting more bright colors and kinesthetic stimulations, or how fear should be considered when creating horror movies by adopting stark contrasts of images that we would not normally expect to see in the real world. Turns out, the book was more of a psychological approach to the whole design process, where Norman provides readers with well-established psychological theories, coupled with real world examples, and suggestions for applications in the design process. Instead of breaking down emotions separately, Norman considers emotion as a single concept, which is closer to the psychological definition of the term. Norman considers emotions as a hindsight attribute of a physical environment. An example that we like to use in psychology is the saying that “You are not running away from a bear because you’re scared, you’re scared because you’re running away from a bear”. This distinction allows Norman to separate the emotional response into three layers, which I will discuss further. The book did not answer my initial question revolving my interpretation of the term “emotional design”, but it did spark a lot of other questions within me about catering the designs for consumers with different emotional needs.
One of the biggest takeaways was Norman, Ortony and Russell’s (2003) Three Level of Processing model. The model breaks down our human experiences of perception into three levels: the visceral level, the behavioral level and the reflective level. The visceral level is our quickest, and almost automatic response to a sensory response. It could be sensory feelings such as hot or cold, smooth or rough, hard or soft, etc, or it could be snap judgments such as whether you like what you’re seeing or not, or whether you think what you’re seeing is aesthetically appealing or not. This level could essentially trigger a motor response subconsciously, such as retracting your hand if the sensation is unappealing, or saying the word “Ouch” when pain is perceived (even when pain was not actually felt). The behavioral level is our subconscious operation of daily human actions. Since attention is limited, our behavioral level allows us to perceive familiar objects and trigger an automatic response to that object. For example, when we hop on a bike, we don’t necessarily think about to the steps of riding a bike, we just somehow do it. This level is also to root of some of our “auto-pilot” daily activities, like taking a shower, having breakfast, grabbing your keys, driving your car — activities that you sometimes weren’t even awake enough to be aware of what you’re doing. Finally, the reflective level is our most conscious level where we interpret what our current experience is, recall what our past experience was and label our experience with arbitrary and subjective words or labels, such as “I felt good”, or “this never ends well”. Reflective thoughts are what we widely understand as emotions. Using this model, we could understand that when we design objects or services, we have to factor in how our consumers will react to our design. On the visceral level, our consumers will focus on the aesthetics and touchpoint of our products; on the behavioral level, our consumers will focus on how easy to use is the product; on the reflective level, our consumers will, in hindsight, evaluate on their subjective experience of the product. Although it might be tempting to say that the best products should cater to all levels, Norman actually suggested analyzing the consumer base and targeting on specific levels, which brings me to my next point.
The second takeaway was his point on targeting consumers on the reflective level. Norman suggested that it is unrealistic to start by considering all different levels of perception; instead, he mentioned that different consumer bases have different emotional needs and these would lead to different levels being more important to them. If our consumer base are impulsive shoppers, we should focus more on the visceral level and design an aesthetically pleasing app with timely popups and rewards to satisfy their visceral needs. Since our consumer base are people who are environmentally-conscious and puts considerable thoughts before making purchasing decisions, it would be more beneficial if we catered towards the reflective level. To build a product that caters towards the reflective level, we will have to put more focus on the holistic experience of the app and including features that reinforces the consumer’s personal identity as an environmentally-conscious person — which our interviewees did mention that our eco-points tracker was able to accomplish that.
There’s a lot that I left out from the book, so I would whole-heartedly recommend reading the actual book to learn more about “emotional design”.
