Designing for Emotion Chapter 6

Part of our assignment this week was to read one last chapter of our choice from Designing for Emotion, the textbook (e-book) we’re using for our PR Publications class. I liked this book and found it informative and easy to read. I’d much rather spend $9 on something relevant than $75 on something I barely use.

I agree with the idea that when problems come up, it’s important to keep people updated. People are already going to be frantic and stressed about outages/really any other sort of problem, but they’ll be even more stressed if they have no idea what’s going on or what’s being done to solve the problem. As the chapter states, “updates let people know you’re still focusing all of your attention on resolving the problem.”

I disagree with the idea that something like a coloring contest is going to make everybody forget about the outage. Yes, in Flickr’s case some users participated in this and for these users, they probably remember the good and not the bad. However, I feel like some people were irritated with the outage and a coloring contest was not really the response that they were looking for.