Lesson 4 Designing for Emotion

Chapter 4 in Designing for Emotion takes the previous exploration of personality was taken a step further with the concept of emotional engagement. The idea is that creating a personality in the first step to eliciting an emotional response, but next the interface must use the personality to interact with the user.

This manifests itself in many different ways. One example given was the Photojojo shopping cart and large orange arm that reveals the product description. The interaction with the sit, changing the characters to make them happy, as well as the element of surprise keeps customers engaged and shopping on the website. Another example was the talking chimp onMailChimp’s website. The chimp generates random comments, which sometimes directly apply to the customer, for example “Your hair cut looks great MAckenzie!”

While I think that the engagement and elements of surprise are fun elements that don’t detract from the shopping experience, I think that they aren’ as important as the book makes them out to be.