Designing for Emotion – Chapter 4

This week, I started out by reading chapter 4 in Designing for Emotion. The chapter is titled Emotional Engagement. I found this chapter interesting because it referenced the past chapters and explained how to apply the design techniques that we have learned so far. The reason why we want humanistic designs with personality is to create an emotional engagement with the viewer. Some of the technique that can spark positive engagement are surprise, delight, anticipation, exclusivity, and elevating perceived status.

This chapter gave many examples to how different company’s use these techniques to achieve their desired goal, which is to create positive and memorable engagement with the viewer. One example I thought was interesting was the example of Twitter vs. Facebook. When Twitter redesigned their platform, they gave their users a choice if they wanted to upgrade to the new version or not. Unlike Facebook, that forced their users to switch to their new platform when they upgraded their system.  I think that is an important example because it shows that giving your users/viewers a choice in what they do makes a significant impact on their engagement with the program/site/etc.

One thing that I did not agree with this chapter was the conclusion. It was giving all these great examples of how different companies achieved positive engagement but said that they are not to be emulated. I think it is smart to emulated some of the tactics that the examples showed because they were successful and good building block to future designs.