Emotional Design

Emotional Design, by Don Norman, was mainly about how we associate emotions with everyday things. Attractive things are easier to use because we are in a positive state, which means we're more relaxed. We can think more critically when we're at ease, so if anything goes wrong, alternative solutions can be found. When we see something unattractive, we become more stressed, so our train of thought becomes more narrow and we may miss obvious solutions to our problems. Also, he mentioned the levels of emotions: visceral, behavioral, reflective. Visceral level is based on the appearance. Behavioral is based on how effective and pleasurable it is . Reflective is more looking back at the experience. Some designs focus on each of these levels separately, but good designs use all 3. These concepts can be used to make better games and sites for the public, but most companies don't implement them. For example, the google search page has 1 o in google for each page. Little things like that makes a website seem more fun than the generic yahoo search pages, which is rather bland and more work oriented. Also, game companies could use these concepts to create better games that cater to subgroups that use their products. However, they don't do that and sell a game system for everyone. Of course, this could be due to business reasons.

I like this book. The idea that we like to use attractive things is something we don't think about, but subconsciously do. Also, the levels of thinking and how lower levels can be overridden by higher thinking makes sense, although we don't think in those terms.