Emotional Design: Don Norman

Summary:
Emotional Design is a follow up to Don Norman's Design of Every Day Things.  The book takes a different turn where instead of focusing on the ease of use of a product it focuses on the emotional appeal of an object.  The emotion, Don argues, comes from many factors such as the visual appeal of an object.  He claims that visualy striking objects that invoke pleasent emotions in the user will be easier to use because the user will be more tolerant to faults in the system.  Systems without any visual appeal, on the other hand, will be less usefull because as using it the user will experience negative emotions causing them to notice and care about faults in the system much more.

Don argues that objects can also impose feelings beyond their visual appeal.  Some items can have emotional meaning because of a time they helped the user or for memories that the item invokes.  Items such as pictures serve no utliitarian purpose beyond looking nice and evoking memories but they are some of peoples most prized possesions.  He argues that even though they serve no apparent purpose these are the objects that people will run back into their burning homes to recover.

I personally didnt enjoy this book very much.  He made good points but it was difficult to refrain from comparing some of his statments to the previous book Design of Everyday Things and to observe how in many cases the books, both by Don Norman, contradicted themselves.  The lemon juicer on the front of the book is a great example.  In his first book Don would have argued that the juicer was not usefull because if it is actually used, the plating will get eaten away.  He would have most likely used his common derogatory phrase to indicate that it probably won a design award.  In this book however, the lemon juicer is praised for its visual appeal.

These contradictions seemed to cause a lot of trouble for me.  It felt like the credibility of the author was slipping.  While there were many good points made in the book it was hard to focus on them when it felt like he was routinely backing off on his main points from the first book.