Week 5: 9/13/2018 Emotional Design:
Emotional Design, in Human-Computer Interaction, is a type of design that is capable of invoking emotion within the user through it’s design. It’s goal is well defined by The Interaction Design Foundation’s website that states “Emotional design strives to create products that elicit appropriate emotions, in order to create a positive experience for the user.” This section needs to describe the term and its meanings through citations and references from library sources or textbooks under study.
So for example, a user interface can be designed with a very colorful and happy design to invoke happiness and relax the user, or can be designed with sad images and wording to invoke sadness and compassion.
Reflection on the Topic
As somebody who has very little eye for color or art, (and one experience with a virtual agent that was terrible), the part of the book that discussed how colors and anthropomorphism was particularly interesting to me as it’s something I’ve never thought about before and preferred it left out personally. with the idea of anthropomorphism, we go back to how people originally learned to use computers (by comparing them to stuff we could easily understand). Trying to build an interface that could be interacted with like another person would be closest to perfect design that we could get, as other people are what we always interact with. Even just a little personally helps, take an error code for example; no-one is going to be thrilled to see an error, and for many people a windows blue screen of death is extremely scary. an article on oreilly talks about some errors and particularly about the BSOD and how scary and sudden it was. (Huriff) Microsoft has since changed this by adding a frowny face and friendly-sounding text that the PC crashed. As an example, which looks less scary to you?
I’m a PC tech, so it makes little difference to me. But the calls I get are a different story. Customers either calmly tell make that “Hey, my computer did a frowny face” OR I get a heavy, shaky sounding “Whoa my computer did something really scary and threw a bunch of words and I don’t know what to do!” It’s a small design change that I’m very thankful for.
My Thought
“We can create a more friendly and accepting environment for using computers by adding human-like qualities to them in a process called anthropomorphism. It gives the user yet another point to connect with and help ease the learning step. Even just providing a little humor can make something much easier to digest. or a fronwy face instead of crap ton of technical jargon makes an error less scary (L.E. Spencer, 2018).
Reference List
⦁ Siang, Teo. “Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We can Learn From” Interaction Design Foundation, Interaction Design Foundation, 8 Aug 2018, http://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/bad-design-vs-good-design-5-examples-we-can-learn-frombad-design-vs-good-design-5-examples-we-can-learn-from-130706
⦁ Huriff, Scott. “The mechanics of interface design” O’REILLY, Oreilly Media, 10 May 2016, http://www.oreilly.com/learning/mechanics-interface-design