Designing for Emotion Chapter 4

Chapter 4 of Desiging for Emotion discusses the emotional engagement of the audience with web design. It gave specific examples of the audience’s emotional reactions to websites and the redesigns of websites.

I agreed with the idea that users are more likely to elicit an emotional response when they are surprised or there is some sort of anticipation. I know from personal experience that I am more likely to interact with a website when there’s some sort of anticipation of what’s to come or some sort of surprise. An example that I can think of is how Facebook has started allowing you to put a banner on your profile picture temporarily to reflect your college football preferences. It was a surprise to me to log in and see all my friends with an OU filter over their photos.

I disagreed with the way that MailChimp would give its users more personalized messages that may or may not actually be relevant to them. To me, it seemed like a waste of their time and energy to put work into creating those messages when the likelihood of them actually being applicable to a user was slim. And as the author shared, there could be times when the message was actually offensive.