Chapter 6

I chose to read Chapter 6 from Designing for Emotion for the final chapter of this book. The chapter was titled “Forgiveness” so I was kind of intrigued by it. It talks about how to handle a negative situation if something wrong were to happen to a website, like if it crashed or went down for a certain period of time. It addresses good ways to keep the audience happy or at least how to make sure they will be forgiving is a mistake does occur. To me, this tied together many of the previous chapters and talked about how to handle things if they go wrong, in order to take care of business and keep your customers happy, you have to build up the emotions beforehand. This chapter brought up a lot about a incident that happened with Flickr. Their site ran out of storage and went down for a few hours causing some panic with their customers but they had the awesome and creative idea to have a contest. I love that the book used this example and even throughout the book in every chapter there were real situations to relate to.

Something I didn’t agree with was just that this focused only on web design and websites. I feel like this wouldn’t be the case for users for maybe a news site or something. A lot of the material in this chapter can be applied elsewhere but sometimes it gets a little too focused in on websites providing a product or specific service. Which then again, I guess most, if not all, websites do.