Emotional Design - Revisited

"How did the packaging of water become an art form?"

1. The selling of premium bottled water in major cities of the world, where the tap water is perfectly healthful, has become a big business. Water sold in this way is more expensive than gasoline. Indeed, the cost is part of the attraction where the reflective side of the mind says, "If it is this expensive, it must be special.

This passage prompts several questions about the psychology of a consumer as he or she contemplates the cost of a product. Experience tells us that generally, cost and value are directly proportional. The more valuable a product is, the more it costs. But when considering bottled water as a product, it is difficult to make sense of the wide price range. When I walk into a gas station or the local spirits store for a bottle of water, I could always just buy the cheapest brand offered. Be that as it may, I always look for Dasani. The design of the water bottle appeals to me viscerally; it looks the best and feels the best. The plastic used is stronger than the cheaper brands, whose plastic almost crinkles under touch. Also, it may or may not be all in my head, but Dasani water even tastes better than the cheaper brand. However, even if the cheaper brand tasted better to me, the visceral design of the actual Dasani water bottle trumps any difference in taste, as I usually end up refilling the Dasani bottle a few times with tap water anyway.

Prices range from 99 cent store brand water bottles to the world-famous Perrier brand to a $75 bottle of "Bling H2O", a brand created by a Hollywood producer and featured at the MTV Video Music Awards as well as the Emmys. The fact that brands like "Bling H2O" actually sell proves that "the entire success of the product lies in its package, not its contents." The package has become the product, a product that is almost completely visceral. The cost of the bottled water certainly contributes to the "wow" factor, an important factor for boosting sales.

2. The categories visceral, behavioral, and reflective are definitely useful when evaluating a product. Once explained, the names of the categories were easy enough to remember and understand. However, if I were to rename them, I would probably use the names aesthetic and functional rather than visceral and behavioral. I believe the term reflective works quite well.

3. A designer should, for the most part, aim for his or her product to succeed on all three levels of design. However, if he or she had to focus on one level only, it would very much depend on what kind of product is to be designed.

Doors, for the most part, are purely behavioral, aside from the exceptions like the doors to the European post office described by Norman in The Design of Everyday Things. Those doors were designed on a mostly visceral level, while the majority of doors are designed to be completely behavioral.

Designers of the packaging of food should aim for good visceral design. This is vital to the success of a particular brand of food. It is what immediately distinguishes different brands of similar products on store shelves, and the customer is most likely to go for the most visually pleasing of the selection in front of them.

Clothing, while visceral and behavioral to a point, can be extremely reflective. From the different patterns, materials, colors, and styles, there are endless possibilities to make a statement about who you are. Clothing in itself can have personality, and this is something I believe the designer should always have in mind.

Emotional Design

1. The main purpose of Norman's Emotional Design is to explain the three main levels of design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.

The visceral level of design is the most basic and the most immediate of the three levels of design. As Norman writes, "Visceral design is what nature does." Norman touches on co-evolution to give a brief description of how we react to certain things and why. For example, "the human love of sweet tastes and smells and of bright, highly saturated colors probably derives from this co-evolution of mutual dependence between people and plants." Much of what draws us viscerally to things has been genetically present for thousands of years.

Norman's description of the behavioral level of design most closely resembles his earlier work, The Design of Everyday Things. In this section, he touches on a design's performance. He stresses usability and iterates that good behavioral designs fulfill a need, and fulfill that need easily and completely. He brings back the topics of feedback and mappings to illustrate what a good behavioral design looks like.

The last level of design, and the most complex, is the reflective level. The reflective level is the most personal. Reflective design "is all about message, about culture, and about the meaning of a product or its use." Our possessions are the vehicles for displaying an image of ourselves. In short, they reflect certain aspects of our lives or personalities.

2. Although the topics of both pieces of writing differ, the fundamentals of The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design are the same. Both focus on how humans interact with designs, and how to bring a design to life in a way that complements a human's approach and reaction to that design. Both works are also structured similarly. He combines case studies and examples with clear, interesting prose to create a work that is interesting and attention retaining.

3. When I think of something in my life that is there because of my visceral reaction, I think of my car. Of course, behavioral design was a big part of the selection. MPG and overall cost were the main factors I used to narrow the field, but when it came down to it, the car in my driveway (2.3 miles away in Dearborn) is the car that was most viscerally appealing.

Looking around my dorm, one of the most behavior-oriented things that I can see is my microwave. I acquired it from a high school giveaway for free, and, aesthetically, I got what I paid for. It's a simple, boxy design, but if I were losing sleep over how it looks in my room, I could go out and spend more money to get a sleeker looking machine. However, the boxy device does what it's supposed to do. You put in something cold, you get out something hot, and in the end, that is all that matters.

For me, my class ring is one of the most reflective possessions I own. I went to the same school for twelve years, growing up with the people I met there. I knew that my ring would always remind me of that major portion of my life, and I wanted the ring to reflect my sentiments. I ended up paying a lot of money. I knew I could have spent much less on fake diamonds and a cheaper metal, but I felt that that would not have genuinely reflected my feelings. However, I do not regret the price at all, and in the two years that I've owned the ring, not a day has gone by in which I haven't worn it.

The Design of Everyday Things - Revisited

"Alas, poor design predominates."

1.I asked him to explain. "You mean," I said, "that it takes five or six tries to get an idea right?"

"Yes," he said, "at least that."

"But," I replied, "you also said that if a newly introduced product doesn't catch on in the

first two or three times, then is it dead?"

"Yup," he said.

"Then new products are almost guaranteed to fail, no matter how good the idea."

"Now you understand," said the designer.

I found this passage particularly thought-provoking because of the logical conflict it presents.

If what the designer stated is true, then the process of a good idea materializing into a product

we see on shelves can be compared to a hurdle race... with five or six hurdles. However, in this race,

most of the good athletes are only able to clear one or two hurdles at the most, while the bad athletes

are managing to clear them all. At the end of the race, we see many more bad desig...I mean,

athletes... at the finish line. This makes no logical sense, and neither does the designer's

statement, at first.

So why does poor design predominate? It can boil down for a couple different factors. Perhaps

some bad designs have succeeded because they were backed by a famous brand name or company.

Perhaps they succeeded just because of their novelty. This passage from Norman's article certainly

raises questions worth discussing.

2. Norman's book can still be used today because it is, at risk of sounding cliche, almost as timeless

as human nature. Again, the main idea of this chapter is that a good design works with, not against

a human's natural approach towards that design. If in twenty years humankind forgets how to decide

to open doors, then Norman's book might be facing a bit of a problem.

3. My basic design checklist would include:

1. Visibility (Does my product have visual cues indicating how it can be used?)
2. Feedback (Will consumers be able to see when their actions have been completed?)
3. Simplicity (Have I only included the essential features?)

The Design of Everyday Things

1. The main focus of Norman's article is the relationship between a person's approach to an object and the design of that object. He discusses various points such as visibility, feedback, simplicity and clear relationships between controls and their outcomes. His main conclusion is that a good design works with a human's natural approach, not against it.

Good designs, according to Norman, have visual cues as to how they are to be used. Norman uses the example of a door. When you approach a door, you immediately judge, consciously or not, how the door should be opened. Should it be pushed, pulled, or slid to one side or the other? Usually, you do not need to put much thought into the decision. When the door has a vertical handle, you assume that you need to pull to open it. If the door has a horizontal handle or no handle at all, you assume you need to push, and, as Norman explains, you push on the unsupported side. However, when the designer decides that he or she wants to trump clarity of use with beauty, some of these visual clues may disappear, as in the case of the doors in the European post office mentioned in the article.

Proper feedback is essential to a good design; types of feedback can be as simple as a door swinging open or technologically sophisticated as an audio confirmation to convey that a task has been successfully performed. Lack of feedback is one of the main reasons why the telephone systems discussed in Norman's article were poorly designed. You could push almost any button (and chances are that that button is unmarked) in an attempt to use one of the phone's many nonessential features, but you would be given no confirmation on whether or not the job was carried out.

Simplicity must be taken into account when attempting to create the "perfect" design, especially the simplicity of visual cues. This aspect of a design presents a challenge: where do you draw the lines between too simple and not simple enough? The doors to the European post office were too simple; there were not enough visual cues for Norman's friend to easily determine whether to push or pull. On the other hand, the example of the washing machine demonstrates how a design can be far from simple enough. The excessive amount of settings and functions overwhelmed the couple who bought the machine, and they resorted to memorizing one setting and ignoring the rest.

Norman used the example of a Mercedes Benz to illustrate a good relationship between controls and their outcomes in a good design. For instance, consider the controls used to adjust the position of the seat. The control itself was shaped like the seat; if you wanted to raise the front of the seat, you would tilt the front of the control up. The relationship is clear and obvious, requiring no instructions.

All of these examples illustrate Norman's main point: a good design cooperates with a person's natural approach to the object; it does not hinder it.

2. At home back in Dearborn, the oven my family owns is one of the most irritating appliances in the house. I have many complaints about it, such as the fact that despite the oven having two shelves, you can only use one if you want something cooked correctly. Another flaw is the combination of the timer and the temperature control of the oven itself. There is only one button labeled off/clear. Somehow this is supposed to apply to both the temperature and the timer. Ninety percent of the times I (attempt to) use it, I have discovered too late that I turned the entire oven off when I meant to only turn the timer off, and left the food uncooked or only halfway cooked, resulting in the pizza delivery guy knocking on the door half an hour later.

3. As far as the design of the iPod is concerned, Fadell and the designing team could have gone exactly by the principles discussed in Norman's article. The iPod has just the right amount of visual cues to hint to the user how to operate the device. The iPod obviously has effective feedback. If you don't hear music, you know you must have missed something. But with such effective mappings and such clear relationships between the controls and their outcomes, chances are that you'll get the feedback you are looking for every time.

The Perfect Thing

1. The first element of the design process is knowing what you are about to design. In Anthony Fadell's case, "the job was to put together an MP3 music player that would work with Apple's existing iTunes application and would not suck." The next element of any design process is the trials involved in bringing a product as close to perfection as possible. The article goes on to describe such trials in designing a Macintosh computer. Beginning with an extremely large, expensive machine with no hard drive in 1984, Apple went through trial after trial to come up with a computer "half the size of a shoebox. Fadell's trials for the iPod, were, of course, different. His first trial was a device that did not come with a hard drive; instead, it had a "big slot" for one, and the consumer would have had to supply their own. His next trial device had its own memory, but the memory would be wiped clean every time the battery died, and this clearly would not work, seeing as the purpose of this product was to be a portable music player, and no one wants to carry around a portable power source. Through all the trials, however, one feature stood out: the scroll wheel. The idea of the scroll wheel solved the time-consuming "plus and minus buttons" on the already-existing MP3 players.

Then came the process of perfection. Details such as whether or not to have a power button were worked out, and then came ideas such as making the revolutionary product multi-lingual.

Thus, with the brilliance of Steve Jobs and his team, the first wave of the world-famous iPod hit the shelves.

2. In order to evaluate a "perfect thing," some different factors need to be taken into consideration:

• Appearance. Appearance of a product is the first thing a consumer will notice. Look and style are important. If a consumer can easily see the product in their great grandmother's house, it is probably not visually up to date.
• Convenience. How would the product fit into and work with the demands of everyday life? The convenient iPod we know would probably not be nearly as successful if it were the size of a laptop.
• Efficiency and Durability. The product has to do its job, and do its job well. Constant breakdowns are an obvious consumer turn-off.
• Cost. The price of the product is essential. No one is going to pay $1000 dollars for an mp3 player.

3. I currently own an iPod Touch. I can definitely say that it has more strengths than weaknesses. In my opinion, the most apparent strength is the design of the touch screen. The iPod Touch is the first iPod in which the screen dominates the device, and this sleek touch screen boasts a visually pleasing, modern look and organization that grants the user easy access to any of the useful functions such as music, iTunes, contacts, photos, and so much more.

One nagging weakness, however, is the battery life. Over the time I have owned my iPod touch, the battery life seems to weaken after every re-charge, and this obviously is not too convenient for someone who is usually on the go. Despite this flaw, however, the many features and strengths of the iPod have won Apple my loyalty for good.

The Essentially Awkward Introduction Post that we all love.

Do you ever draw a complete blank when asked to talk about yourself? Nice to meet you. Here are some really random things I can think of:

I consider myself an extremely open-minded, tolerant person.

I used to say my political beliefs were moderate, but the hell with that, I'm pretty liberal.

I clash with closed-minded people, definitely. Nothing drives me up a wall more than ignorance.

I love love LOVE the red wings. I also like playing/watching soccer.

I'm naturally introverted but I've been trying really hard to change that. Kzoo is my first real fresh start after 12 years, so I'm handling the drastic change as best as I can.

My hobbies are music, theater, language, literature, politics, coffee/tea, rpg's, hockey, EUCHRE. I will drop most anything to play euchre.

I'm double majoring in German and whatever will get me a job with the UN.

I'm really into movies. A few of my friends were film aficionados, and I do my best to keep up. Much love for Edward Norton.

My favorite books are Catch-22 and Catcher in the Rye...and the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

I'm in Trow 215 this year, stop by whenever!