Designing for Emotion : 1

When I read through the first chapter of Designing for Emotion, I remembered the old cheesy saying that “people will forget what you say, they’ll forget what you do, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” As dumb as it is, I think it really plays well into the psychology behind successful design. Things such as search engines, apps and website, I either love or hate and don’t really think that much about why. I really liked how he related this type of design to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to how people view web design. Pinpointing just what it is that people react well to, functionality, reliability, usability, and pleasurability, helps to create  a successful design.

While I think that aesthetic and functionality can elicit an emotion, I think he might being taking things a little far when he claims that the goal is to create a chemical reaction in the brain to release dopamine. I don’t know that a website, no matter how functional and pretty, would really give me an emotional high like that.