Emotional Design

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

2. 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.

3. Introduction • Who should care: • Designers • Programmers • Engineers • Inventors & Creators • Producers • Who it affects: • Everyone!

4. Background • Multidisciplinary: • Information Sciences • Cognitive Science • Computer Science • Artificial Intelligence • Philosophy • Art & Design • Software & Game Development

5. 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

6. Background • Contests classic approaches that treat human behavior as ‘stimulus-response’ and consider emotions as noise

7. Playtime • Fold n’ Drop: http://tinyurl.com/arb93 • panic: http://panic.com/ • Google Maps: http://tinyurl.com/c45rm

8. 3 Divisions • Let’s 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

9. Design • Designing for Norman’s 3 levels: • Visceral design -> product appearance • Behavioral design -> usability • Reflective design -> self-image • Google: playful, anti-corporate • Apple’s iPod: stylish, avant-garde

10. 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.

11. 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 user’s emotions

12. 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).

13. Human-Computer Etiquette • Computers As Social Actors (CASA) • “All interfaces, however badly developed, have personality” (Topffer’s 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.

14. 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

15. Limitations • Design implication: you can’t avoid the emotional effects of the task your program supports, but you can help the user deal with those effects

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

17. 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

18. Culture • Uh-oh, some things aren’t 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

19. Cost-Justifying • And now for something completely different… • Emotional design isn’t all sunshine and puppy dogs—someone has to pay the designers • And inevitably someone has to convince the money holders that their money is well-spent

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. Conclusions • There’s no such thing as an idyllic design • Norman says we can’t design for all the levels at once (visceral, behavioral, reflective) • There will always be internationalization issues • “Know thy user!” • “Know thy user’s tasks!” • “Know thy user’s emotional state!”

24. 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?