Design 4 Emotion

This week in my PR publication course we were asked to identify a stakeholder for our client, OU recruitment Services. After deciding on my stakeholder for my client, I read the Emotional Design chapter in our book in order to better understand how ’emotion’ can effect our stakeholder’s perception of my client.

I found a lot of information in this chapter to be really helpful. It was great that the author decided to take a step by step approach when explaining how important ’emotion’ is to the audience. Referencing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs I feel is a good way to show that emotion is not necessarily the most important thing in deign, but it is the most pleasurable to the viewer. Thus emotion is at the high-point of Maslow’s pyramid because it is the most enjoyable aspect of design. As a PR professional we must ensure that our message is not only functional, reliable and usable; but also pleasurable to our audience so that they are more willing to act on the message they are receiving.

To Agree…

I must say that out of all the information that was helpful in this chapter that one thing I will keep with me forever, which is the section titled “Emotion and Memory”. I cannot agree more with the author on this point when he states, “Emotionally charged events persist much longer in our memories and are recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories.” He gives great examples of how as children we learn to love our parents by the emotional responses they give us. Thinking about other memories in my own life it is the emotional ones, whether sad or happy, scared or thrilled, that are ones I remember most vividly. When thing about design, it is paramount that we think about emotion and how to create an emotional response that is symbolic of our client or a response that we want to illicit in our audience.

To Disagree…

The only part that I had trouble agreeing with the author on is the section “Getting the Basics Right”. He talks about how the functionality and usability of the design were the most important aspects of how things needed to be developed, but that the industry was moving away from just simple basic designs to ones that create emotional responses. While it is true that industry is getting more creative with their designs, I think some companies still prefer the simplicity of the design in order to help consumers. Take Apple’s iTunes or Amazon’s webpage for example. Both of these designs are made in order for functionality and usability. You can see exactly where certain categories are and there is not a lot of clutter to distract you attention to one thing. I think some designs need to just stay simple because going to a online retailer like Amazon, customers just want to know where they can find the item they are looking for not what emotion Amazon is trying to convey.

 

I am not trying to argue that emotion is not important to Apple or Amazon but that certain areas in their business call for specific design elements. Ask anyone what emotion Apple has and most people could come up with a few adjectives. However, they convey their emotion through commercial and bill board ads not their iTunes store. Some design projects will call for an emotionally charged response while others will need to keep the simplicity in order to make it functional for our stakeholders. It is our job as PR professionals to make a distinct difference as to when to use our designs to create emotion and when to use our design to make a usable layout.