Designing for Emotion

This week we learned about identifying and prioritizing stakeholders and publics. We made a segmenting stakeholders matrix.

We also read part of Designing for Emotion. Jared Spool does a great job of realizing and discussing why web interaction and design must include an emotional element. I really agree with his statement that “there’s plenty of opportunity to build fast and cheap sites with no reverence for craft or the relationship we build with our audience…Or we could follow a different path, one paved by the artists, designers, and architects of the Arts and Crafts movement, who believed that preserving the human touch and showing ourselves in our work isn’t optional. It’s essential” (p. 2). I think this is so true! There has always been this disconnect online, a stigma that online interaction is ruining our communication skills, our emotional attachment, or level of interaction that makes us human, but lately, people have been so innovative and inclusive of personal touch and emotion, that online interaction is definitely taking a different turn. People realize online communication isn’t going anywhere, so they might as well get on board an make it personal; more human.

Something Spool said that I don’t completely agree with is his statement that “emotional design turns casual users into fanatics ready to tell others about their positive experiences” (p. 14). While this is true in some ways, I also think that there’s a lot more than just an emotional connection to create a fanatic and even more to get someone to act. Because of the amount of “calls to action” that are online and people asking users to do this or that, there needs to be incentive and I’m not sure a simple emotional connection cuts it anymore. In a sense, we become almost immune to those emotional calls to action and seek other forms of connection. Emotional helps, but it’s not all that needs to be done.