Emotional Design

by Donald A. Norman

  The reflective side of emotion is involved as well, for the saved bottles can serve as reminders of the occasion when the beverage was ordered or consumed. Because both wine and expensive water are sometimes purchased for special occasions, the bottles serve as mementos of those occasions, taking on a special emotional value, becoming meaningful objects, not because of the objects themselves, but because of the memories they produce, and, as I noted in chapter 2, memories can trigger the powerful, long-lasting emotions.

  What are the design factors in play here, where pure appearance is the issue, beauty that is all on the surface? This is where those genetic, hard-wired biological processes play their role. Here the designs are apt to be “eye candy,” as sweet to the eye as the taste of candy to the mouth. Yet just as sweet-tasting candy is empty of nutritional value, so, too, is appearance empty beneath the surface.

  Human responses to the everyday things of the world are complex, determined by a wide variety of factors. Some of these are outside the person, controlled by designer and manufacturer, or by advertising and such things as brand image. And some come from within, from your own, private experiences. Each of the three levels of design—visceral, behavioral, and reflective—plays its part in shaping your experience. Each is as important as the others, but each requires a different approach by the designer.

  Visceral Design

  Visceral design is what nature does. We humans evolved to coexist in the environment of other humans, animals, plants, landscapes, weather, and other natural phenomena. As a result, we are exquisitely tuned to receive powerful emotional signals from the environment that get interpreted automatically at the visceral level. This is where the lists of features in chapter 1 came from. Thus, the colorful plumage on male birds was selectively enhanced through the evolutionary process to be maximally attractive to female birds—as, in turn, were the preferences of female birds so as to discriminate better among male plumages. It’s an iterative, co-adaptive process, each animal adapting over many generations to serve the other. A similar process occurs between males and females of other species, between co-adaptive life forms across species, and even between animals and plants.

  Fruits and flowers provide an excellent example of the co-evolution of plants and animals. Nature’s evolutionary process made flowers to be attractive to birds and bees, the better to spread their pollen, and fruits to be attractive to primates and other animals, the better to spread their seeds. Fruits and flowers tend to be symmetrical, rounded, smooth, pleasant to the touch, and colorful. Flowers have pleasant odors, and most fruits taste sweet, the better to attract animals and people who will eat them and then spread the seeds, whether by spitting or defecation. In this co-evolution of design, the plants change so as to attract animals, while the animals change so as to become attracted to the plants and fruits. The human love of sweet tastes and smells and of bright, highly saturated colors probably derives from this coevolution of mutual dependence between people and plants.

  The human preference for faces and bodies that are symmetrical presumably reflects selection of the fittest; non-symmetrical bodies probably are the result of some deficiency in the genes or the maturation process. Humans select for size, color, and appearance, and what you are biologically disposed to think of as attractive derives from these considerations. Sure, culture plays a role, so that, for example, some cultures prefer fat people, others thin; but even within those cultures, there is agreement on what is and is not attractive, even if too thin or too fat for specific likes.

  When we perceive something as “pretty,” that judgment comes directly from the visceral level. In the world of design, “pretty” is generally frowned upon, denounced as petty, trite, or lacking depth and substance—but that is the designer’s reflective level speaking (clearly trying to overcome an immediate visceral attraction). Because designers want their colleagues to recognize them as imaginative, creative, and deep, making something “pretty” or “cute” or “fun” is not well accepted. But there is a place in our lives for such things, even if they are simple.

  You can find visceral design in advertising, folk art and crafts, and children’s items. Thus, children’s toys, clothes, and furniture will often reflect visceral principles: bright, highly saturated primary colors. Is this great art? No, but it is enjoyable.

  Adult humans like to explore experiences far beyond the basic, biologically wired-in preferences. Thus, although bitter tastes are viscerally disliked (presumably because many poisons are bitter), adults have learned to eat and drink numerous bitter things, even to prefer them. This is an “acquired taste,” so called because people have had to learn to overcome their natural inclination to dislike them. So, too, with crowded, busy spaces, or noisy ones, and discordant, nonharmonic music, sometimes with irregular beats: all things that are viscerally negative but that can be reflectively positive.

  The principles underlying visceral design are wired in, consistent across people and cultures. If you design according to these rules, your design will always be attractive, even if somewhat simple. If you design for the sophisticated, for the reflective level, your design can readily become dated because this level is sensitive to cultural differences, trends in fashion, and continual fluctuation. Today’s sophistication runs the risk of becoming tomorrow’s discard. Great designs, like great art and literature, can break the rules and survive forever, but only a few are gifted enough to be great.

  At the visceral level, physical features—look, feel, and sound—dominate. Thus, a master chef concentrates on presentation, arranging food artfully on the plate. Here good graphics, cleanliness, and beauty play a role. Make the car door feel firm and produce a pleasant chunking sound as it closes. Make the exhaust sound of the Harley Davidson motorcycle have a unique, powerful rumble. Make the body sleek, sexy, inviting, such as the classic 1961 Jaguar roadster of figure 3.2. Yes, we love sensuous curves, sleek surfaces, and solid, sturdy objects.

  FIGURE 3.2

  The 1961 Jaguar E-type: Viscerally exciting.

  This automobile is a classic example of the power of visceral design: sleek, elegant, exciting. It is no surprise that the car is in the design collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art.

  (Courtesy of the Ford Motor Corporation.)

  Because visceral design is about initial reactions, it can be studied quite simply by putting people in front of a design and waiting for reactions. In the best of circumstances, the visceral reaction to appearance works so well that people take one look and say “I want it.” Then they might ask, “What does it do?” And last, “And how much does it cost?” This is the reaction the visceral designer strives for, and it can work. Much of traditional market research involves this aspect of design.

  Apple Computer found that when it introduced the colorful iMac computer, sales boomed, even though those fancy cabinets contained the very same hardware and software as Apple’s other models, ones that were not selling particularly well. Automobile designers count on visual design to rescue a company. When Volkswagen reintroduced their classic “beetle” design in 1993, Audi developed the TT, and Chrysler brought out the PT Cruiser, sales for all three companies climbed. It’s all in the appearance.

  FIGURE 3.3

  The sensual component of behavioral design.

  Behavioral design emphasizes the use of objects, in this case, the sensual feel of the shower: a key, often overlooked component of good behavioral design. The Kohler WaterHaven

  Shower.

  (Courtesy of the Kohler Co.)

  Effective visceral design requires the skills of the visual and graphic artist and the industrial engineer. Shape and form matter. The physical feel and texture of the materials matter. Heft matters. Visceral design is all about immediate emotional impact. It has to feel good, look good. Sensuality and sexuality play roles. This is a major role of “point of presence” displays in stores, in brochures, in advertisements, and in other enticements that emphasize appearance. These may be a store’s only
chance of getting the customer, for many a product is purchased on looks alone. Similarly, otherwise highly rated products may be turned down if they do not appeal to the aesthetic sense of the potential buyer.

  Behavioral Design

  Behavioral design is all about use. Appearance doesn’t really matter. Rationale doesn’t matter. Performance does. This is the aspect of design that practitioners in the usability community focus upon. The principles of good behavioral design are well known and often told; indeed, I laid them out in my earlier book, The Design of Everyday Things. What matters here are four components of good behavioral design: function, understandability, usability, and physical feel. Sometimes the feel can be the major rationale behind the product. Consider the shower shown in figure 3.3. Imagine the sensual pleasure, the feel—quite literally—of the water streaming across the body.

  IN MOST behavioral design, function comes first and foremost; what does a product do, what function does it perform? If the item doesn’t do anything of interest, then who cares how well it works? Even if its only function is to look good, it had better succeed. Some well-designed items miss the target when it comes to fulfilling their purpose and thus deserve to fail. If a potato peeler doesn’t actually peel potatoes, or a watch doesn’t tell accurate time, then nothing else matters. So the very first behavioral test a product must pass is whether it fulfills needs.

  On the face of it, getting the function right would seem like the easiest of the criteria to meet, but in fact, it is tricky. People’s needs are not as obvious as might be thought. When a product category already exists, it is possible to watch people using the existing products to learn what improvements can be made. But what if the category does not even exist? How do you discover a need that nobody yet knows about? This is where the product breakthroughs come from.

  Even with existing products, it is amazing how seldom the designers watch their customers. I visited a major software developer to meet with the design team for one of their more widely used products, one that has an overabundance of features, but nonetheless still fails to meet my everyday needs. I came prepared with a long list of problems that I had encountered while attempting to do routine activities. Moreover, I had checked with other dissatisfied users of this product. To my great surprise, much of what I told the design team seemed to be novel. “Very interesting,” they kept saying, while taking copious notes. I was pleased that they paid attention to me, but disturbed by the fact that these rather basic points appeared to be new. Had they never watched people use their products? These designers—like many design teams in all industries—tend to keep to their desks, thinking up new ideas, testing them out on one another. As a result, they kept adding new features, but they had never studied just what patterns of activities their customers performed, just what tasks needed to be supported. Tasks and activities are not well supported by isolated features. They require attention to the sequence of actions, to the eventual goal—that is, to the true needs. The first step in good behavioral design is to understand just how people will use a product. This team had not done even this most elementary set of observations.

  There are two kinds of product development: enhancement and innovation. Enhancement means to take some existing product or service and make it better. Innovation provides a completely new way of doing something, or a completely new thing to do, something that was not possible before. Of the two, enhancements are much easier.

  Innovations are particularly difficult to assess. Before they were introduced, who would have thought we needed typewriters, personal computers, copying machines, or cell phones? Answer: Nobody. Today it is hard to imagine life without these items, but before they existed almost no one but an inventor could imagine what purpose they would serve, and quite often the inventors were wrong. Thomas Edison thought that the phonograph would eliminate the need for letters written on paper: business people would dictate their thoughts and mail the recordings. The personal computer was so misunderstood that several then-major computer manufacturers completely dismissed them: some of those once-large companies no longer exist. The telephone was thought to be an instrument for business, and in the early days, telephone companies tried to dissuade customers from using the phone for mere conversation and gossip.

  One cannot evaluate an innovation by asking potential customers for their views. This requires people to imagine something they have no experience with. Their answers, historically, have been notoriously bad. People have said they would really like some products that then failed in the marketplace. Similarly, they have said they were simply not interested in products that went on to become huge market successes. The cellular telephone is a good example. It was originally thought to be of value to a limited number of business people. Very few people could imagine carrying one simply for personal interaction. Indeed, when individuals first purchased cell phones, they often explained that they didn’t intend to use them, but that they were “in case I have an emergency.” Predicting the popularity of a new product is almost impossible before the fact, even though it may seem obvious afterward.

  Enhancements to a product come primarily by watching how people use what exists today, discovering difficulties, and then overcoming them. Even here, however, it can be more difficult to determine the real needs than might seem obvious. People find it difficult to articulate their real problems. Even if they are aware of a problem, they don’t often think of it as a design issue. Ever struggle with a key, to discover that you are inserting it upside down? Or ever lock your keys inside the automobile? Or lock the car, only to realize that you left the windows open, so you have to unlock the car and lean inside to close them? In any of these cases, would you think these were design flaws? Probably not, probably you just blamed yourself. Well, they all could be corrected by appropriate designs. Why not design a symmetrical key that works no matter which way it is inserted into a lock? Why not design cars so that the key is required to lock the doors, making it much less likely that the car can be locked with the key inside? Why not make it possible to close the windows from outside the car? All of these designs now exist, but it took clever observations for the designers to recognize that the problems could be overcome.

  Ever put batteries into a product in the wrong orientation? Why is this even possible? Why shouldn’t batteries be designed so that they can only go into their slots in one orientation, making it impossible to insert them improperly? I suspect battery makers don’t care, and that manufacturers who purchase and specify batteries for their equipment never considered that it was possible to do things better. Standard cylindrical batteries are excellent examples of poor behavioral design, of a failure to understand the problems facing people who must figure out just which orientation is required for each device—moreover in the face of warning labels that point out that the equipment might be damaged if the batteries are inserted incorrectly.

  Consider the automobile. Sure, it is easy to note that storage areas ought to be bigger or seat adjustments easier, but how about such an obvious item as cup holders for beverages? People like to drink coffee and sodas while riding in their vehicles. Today this seems like an obvious necessity in an automobile, but it was not always thought so. Automobiles have been around roughly a century, but cup holders were not considered appropriate for their interiors until quite recently, and the innovation didn’t come from the automobile manufacturers—they resisted them. What happened was that small manufacturers realized the need, probably because they had built cup holders for themselves, and then discovered that other people wanted them also. Soon, all sorts of add-on devices were being manufactured. These were relatively inexpensive and easy to install in a car: stick-on holders, magnetic holders, bean-bag holders. Some attached to the windows, some to the dashboards, and some to the space between the seats. It was only because these were so popular that manufacturers slowly started to add them as standard items inside the car. Now there is a vast array of clever cup holders. Some people claim that they purchased a parti
cular automobile solely because of its cup holders. Buy a car solely because of the cup holders? Why not? If the car is used primarily for daily commuting and short errands around a city, convenience and comfort for drivers and passengers are the most important needs.

  Even after the need for cup holders seemed obvious, German automobile manufacturers resisted them, explaining that automobiles were for driving, not drinking. (I suspect that this attitude reflects the oldfashioned German automobile design culture, which proclaims that the engineer knows best, and considers studies of real people driving their vehicles irrelevant. But if the automobile is only for driving, why do Germans provide ashtrays, cigarette lighters, and radios?) The Germans reconsidered only when decreases in sales in the United States were attributed to the lack of cup holders. Engineers and designers who believe they do not need to watch the people who use their products are a major source of the many poor designs that confront us.

  My friends at the industrial design firm of Herbst LaZar Bell told me that they had been asked by a company to redesign their floor-cleaning machine to satisfy a long list of requirements. Cup holders were not on the list, but perhaps they should have been. When the designers visited maintenance workers in the middle of the night to observe just how they cleaned the floors of large commercial buildings, they discovered that workers had difficulty drinking coffee while manipulating the huge cleaning and waxing machines. As a result, the designers added cup holders. The new design had numerous major enhancements to the product in both appearance and behavior—visceral and behavioral design—and has proven to be a market success. How important was the cup holder to the success of the new design? Probably not much, except that it is symptomatic of the attention to true customer needs that signifies quality products. As Herbst LaZar Bell properly emphasizes, the real challenge to product design is “understanding end-user unmet and unarticulated needs.” That’s the design challenge—to discover real needs that even the people who need them cannot yet articulate.