Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

In the Donald A. Norman’s creation of Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, the author explains how being attractive, fun and enjoyable makes a product better. This book actually describes about the discussion of the way how people interact with products and how the customers measure the quality of a product through an attractive appearance, the first half in this book will prove quite useful. It expands and shows the good relations into common practices of market segmentation and usage research also providing both concrete advises for optimizing your product for whatever your goals, as well as it follows the requirements of the several of consumer or customer preferences.

    In the first chapter, the author mostly explains about the emotions that play an important role in our daily life. He also wrote about, why he said the first functional model in the design of everyday things disabilities, how the environment affect the positive and negative thinking and can help maintain alertness in focusing, and level of thinking. Emotional also help us to make a good decision. However, negative emotional impact on some people in the focus on the things that cause problems, and if this fails to provide the solution, they were getting more tension, more concerned, and increase their concentration to those details. This case is different with positive emotions that are important along with the negative emotions. Positive emotions sometime important such as in learning make a choice, and when to make the right decision towards an object. Norman’s were briefly explained and exposed about the three levels of brains such as visceral level, behavioral level and reflective level. The first nature layer is known as visceral level while the part that contains the brain processes that control everyday behavior it is known as the behavioral level and the last is thinking part of brain, or it is call reflective level.  Nature does in visceral level and it is very well tuned to a strong emotional signals, it happen automatically and has unavoidable consequences. There was a lot of information packed into this chapter, a pleasant contrast to some of Norman’s earlier writing. A few of what is written here is based on the philosophical and aesthetic design thus some aspects of benefit design is slightly excessive in their way.

    Next, in the first part of chapter two, the author discusses about how the three levels of cognitive and emotional systems work together to help and provide to user or customer about usability and the usage of the whole product experience. The design requirements for each level are totally different in every range. He also discussed about the objects that raised up in user’s memory and give effect to them. In addition, he also explained the details of the role of emotions in design. Special attention was given to both the sentimental value of an object and the role of sense of fulfillment. Use all the opportunities to attract all the layers of consumer not straightly focus at one side only. Then, in the third chapter, Norman goes into detail about the three levels of design. Those are, if you recall, visceral, behavioral, and reflective. That roughly correlates to initial reaction, functionality, and emotion. He goes more in depth of what factors are considered and affect these three levels of design. Visceral design consists of emotions, appearance, and the first impression of an object. It is important because it become attraction to the user's attention, sometimes without knowing what the item really is or what it is for. Behavioral design is concerned with usability and become the basically of the topic of the design of everyday things. And finally reflective design, which relates to our perspective to the product. How it affects our lives, culture and other factors may affect this level of design. The appearance is a big part of how design can attract users to put in the first place.

    This book is a good way to take a new perspective of the design and it can help us to understand how design affects emotions, and how emotions affect purchasing decisions. Thus, the more beautiful and interesting of a product the easier it can be used when we can think it in creatively or innovation way. Furthermore, if our strategy fails to provide, we can seek a solution to resolve it. The author also explains about the meaning of art and design that can push our own works to be better and how to gain an advantage in term of design. Norman’s also bringing us latest with the current thinking in this field and the latest ideas in emotion-driven design, this book will prove to be essential reading for all human factors especially who had involved in design area. From the whole statement above, it is reasonable to conclude that the design of products that affect human emotion and good product design could create positive appeal to user.