Designing For Emotion Ch. 6

For part of my assignments this week, I read Designing For Emotion Ch. 6- Forgiveness. I chose this chapter because of the title; it hit home with me because I know I am often too hard on myself and really bad a self-forgiveness when it comes to schoolwork. Thats probably why I have spent double the time actually needed to do all of these design projects each time; I want them to be so perfect!

One things in the chapter I agreed with: I agree with the logic behind how Flickr handled their website being down for a few hours. The team at flickr decided to get their users happy they had to be honest and get them the facts of the website outage, but also they had to give them something to ease their negative feelings. They did this by creating a coloring contest for user to partake in while the site was done, the winner won a free one year Flickr Pro account. I think this was Genius on Flickr’s behalf and I agree that that was the right way to handle the situation.

Disagreed with: In the end of the chapter, the author argues that aiming for perfection in your work isn’t worth the effort. At first read, I was like uh no this guy is wrong.. why would you not try to make it as perfect as it can be? But then as I read on his full idea started to make a little more sense to me. What he was really saying was that we can try to make our design as perfect as possible, but people don’t catch the good or the bad work that we do, rather its about their overall emotional experience. A good emotional experience can make users overlook even the most perfect work. I get this, but still I’m not too happy about it because I want people to notice my perfect hard work that I’ve done.