Emotional Design

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Emotional Design
Presented by Paul Aumer-Ryan School of
Information The University of Texas
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Introduction

• Emotional Design also called
• Hedonic Design
• Affective Design
• Affective Human Factors Design
• Human-Centered Design
• Empathetic Design
• Quick definition focuses on the influence of
  emotions on the way we interact with objects.

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Introduction

• Who should care
• Designers
• Programmers
• Engineers
• Inventors Creators
• Producers
• Who it affects
• Everyone!

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Background

• Multidisciplinary
• Information Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy
• Art Design
• Software Game Development

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Background

• Where did it come from?
• Human Factors / Ergonomics
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Why is it a separate field?
• Ask Descartes and Aristotle.
• Rational vs. Emotional
• Objective vs. Subjective

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Background

• Contests classic approaches that treat human
  behavior as stimulus-response and consider
  emotions as noise

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Playtime

• Fold n Drop http//tinyurl.com/arb93
• panic http//panic.com/
• Google Maps http//tinyurl.com/c45rm

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3 Divisions

• Lets categorize emotions!
• Niels Engelsted
• Affect (environmental response)
• Emotion (based on memory)
• Sentiment (long-term, love and hate)
• Donald Norman
• Visceral Design (evolutionary responses)
• Behavioral Design (bodily activity)
• Reflective Design (mental activity)

EMOTIONAL DESIGN
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Design

• Designing for Normans 3 levels
• Visceral design -gt product appearance
• Behavioral design -gt usability
• Reflective design -gt self-image
• Google playful, anti-corporate
• Apples iPod stylish, avant-garde

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Usability

• How does emotional design relate to usability?
• Frustration, confusion, anger, anxiety and
  similar emotional states can affect not only the
  interaction itself, but also productivity,
  learning, social relationships, and overall
  well-being (Klein, Moon, Picard, 2002).
• Frustration is doubly troublesome to computer
  users they must deal with the source of
  frustration (the misbehaving computer) and the
  emotional response.

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Usability

• Emotional design as an extension to standard
  usability practices
• Standard practice eliminate sources of
  frustration by addressing them in the design
  phase
• Additional practice make application deal with
  unavoidable user frustration by addressing the
  users emotions

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Human-Computer Etiquette

• The Media Equation (Reeves Nass)
• Humans readily generalize their expectations
  from human-human interaction to human-computer
  interaction regardless of whether or not that is
  the intent of system designers (Miller 2004).

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Human-Computer Etiquette

• Computers As Social Actors (CASA)
• All interfaces, however badly developed, have
  personality (Topffers law, from Mishra,
  Nicholson, Wojcikiewicz 2001-2003).
• Design implication treat the application as if
  it will be a human interacting with the users
• Personify! Your users will, too.

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Limitations

• Emotions are relevant to activity and not to the
  actions or operations that realize it (Aboulafia
  Bannon, 2004).
• In other words, an application is a tool to
  fulfill some task if the task is tedious, the
  tool must deal with this
• In other words, my spreadsheet program is really
  cool, but I still have to type in all the darn
  numbers

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Limitations

• Design implication you cant avoid the emotional
  effects of the task your program supports, but
  you can help the user deal with those effects

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Hedonism

• Hedonism mathematically defined
• There are good emotions and bad emotions
• My purpose is a simple optimization problem
  maximize the good, minimize the bad

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Hedonism

• Problems
• Nuclear technicians laughing and singing songs
  during a meltdown
• Many tasks require anxiety and tension (bad
  emotions) to be completed successfully
• Games are really the only area that hedonistic
  design can apply to

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Culture

• Uh-oh, some things arent universal
• Follow-up to the media equation study In a
  collectivist culture like Japan, people will
  politely reciprocate to the second computer if it
  is the same brand as the first, but not a
  different brand (Nass 2004).
• There are internationalization issues with
  emotional design that must be addressed

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Cost-Justifying

• And now for something completely different
• Emotional design isnt all sunshine and puppy
  dogssomeone has to pay the designers
• And inevitably someone has to convince the money
  holders that their money is well-spent

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Cost-Justifying

• The aspect of emotional design that deals with
  user frustration can already be considered
  usability, and so all of the good cost-justifying
  techniques can be applied here
• Hedonistic design is also easy happier customers
  buy things

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Cost-Justifying

• An emotionally appealing product can convince
  users to spend more time learning to use it
  (e.g., iPod)
• Paying attention to the emotions of executives in
  your company can better prepare you to make your
  case for cost-justifying usability

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Cost-Justifying

• But it seems like more research needs to be done
  on the quantitative effects of other emotions
  before we can address their influence on
• Productivity
• ROI (Return On Investment)
• Social ROI
• Accessibility

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Conclusions

• Theres no such thing as an idyllic design
• Norman says we cant design for all the levels at
  once (visceral, behavioral, reflective)
• There will always be internationalization issues
• Know thy user!
• Know thy users tasks!
• Know thy users emotional state!

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Questions

• Is the term usability too emotionless?
• Do you think the cost-justifying techniques for
  emotional design are any different than those for
  usability?
• Does emotional design allow for more
  inventiveness than standard usability?
• Can emotional design negatively affect
  accessibility?
• Other questions?