Customer Reviews

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As I get older, I begin to see that designing is really about seeing, hearing, thinking and understanding at a higher level. If you're looking for an easy how-to for making your website or product punchier, this isn't for you. For me, the book was a perfect read. I am always hunting and gathering for the meaning of art and design, to push my own work forward, and to gain an advantage over my competitors in terms of design. Thus, Norman's book was right up my alley. His deconstruction of design into its visceral, behavioral and reflective aspects was powerful and compelling, and I believe this book is actually a manifesto that will eventually launch a new school of thought in design. The second half of the book delves into even more complex and forward-thinking issues, and I found it useful for FORCING myself to read and think out of the box. It's an absolute must-have book for anyone interested in understanding the structure of the new design revolution and transforming their perspective on the art of designing at an emotional level.

I love Donald Norman. I love the work he does, and I love what he's taught me. I got so much from The Design of Everyday Things. I got something out of Things That Make Us Smart. I didn't get much out of this one at all.

I think this is because I'm an impatient reader. For example, I don't read fiction. I want to read facts about things I can apply in a practical way. This book is much more about theory than practical applications.

I'm sure some people love reading theory, and they will love this book. But if you're like me and really want a book to deliver information you can use on every page, you should buy The Design of Everyday Things instead, if you haven't already.

If you're looking for a fairly practical discussion of the ways that people interact with products and how more than just behavioral qualities are measured by your customers, the first half of the book will prove quite useful. It expands and ties nicely into common practices of market segmentation and usability studies, providing both concrete advice for optimizing your product for whatever your adoption goals are, as well as a theoretical framework for understanding user behavior.

There's also a large section near the end about robotics and the future. While it's interesting, it reads more like science fiction or the typical dicsussions that you have in either a mobile robot at a university or a AAAI conference. I personally think the book could've stood just as well without it.

There is nothing in this book that changed my perception of the world like the content of "The Design of Everyday Things" but it was still interesting and entertaining, a light-hearted companion to the earlier groundbreaking book.
I enjoyed the way the theories were broken down even if I didn't always buy into them and there were plenty of good examples every step of the way. It's food for thought, just not the main course.

I'm a huge fan of Donald A. Norman, and I'm working on reading every book he ever wrote. I'm now getting down to the very old and obscure ones like "Attention and Memory" (1968!). This new book combines the ideas of his previous work with some fascinating new psychological knowledge, so it is definitely worthwhile.

One thing that makes Norman such a good author is that he gives very graphic analogies to explain his ideas. One sentence that really made me think was that if robots had no idea whether something was safe or not, they could possibly just sit there, afraid to do anything - he likens this to confidence in humans. So it seems like thinking about how robots should work can only help figure out more about humans. That's why I think his new work on robotics adds yet another useful dimension to the work of a man whose focus has been a great blend of academia and business. Now he is tying more and more of those ideas together, blending them with collaboration and new research, so I hope he stays a prolific writer.

Unfortunately I was not everwhelmed by the book, but it is all very sensible and useful. I wish he had gotten more into the passion we feel when something is just superb. I have had that feeling when reading many similar books, like "The Tipping Point", "Don't Make Me Think", and even Norman's own "The Design of Everyday Things". So come to think of it, maybe writing one of those great books plus many other very good books is plenty to ask of a human being.

Donald Norman has always written "usable" books. Easy to read and full of anecdotes and examples that nearly everyone can relate to. His classic work, The Design of Everyday Things, still sits proundly on my bookshelf; I pull it down a couple times a year when I need a mental refreshment.

This book, like its predecessors, is a fast read. It is written at a low level and nothing in it is too hard to grasp. However, it is too long. I found myself skipping whole paragraphs simply because Normas was repeating something he had written just a few sentences back. I feel the book could be half its length and not lose any content.

It's also not as inspirational as his previous books. There were none of the "a ha!" insights that permeated The Design of Everyday Things or Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles.

Still, it's a good read. The next time I'm in the store, I'll be more cognizant of the reasons why I prefer one brand over another of otherwise identical products.

I've been thumbing through this book for the last month, and I have to say that I love it.

I've admired Donald Norman, one of the greatest living cognitive scientists, from afar for over 20 years. He was seemingly afforded "guru" status when he visited the University of Colorado's Institute of Cognitive Science in the mid `80s - an esteemed, accessible and entertaining cognitive/computer scientist (and also a cantankerous one) who had pioneered the human factors movement. His entertaining and friendly style was informed by creative, deep, empirical, theoretical work in cognitive science. I came to trust his insights whenever I dabbled in "usability" and "human factors" issues. (Trust me--there are plenty of people who think they understand these things, but Norman is the real deal who delivers the necessary stuff... Check out his masterpiece, "The Design of Everyday Things."). By the time I arrived at UCSD in the late 90s, he had already left our university for Apple Computer, but he seems to have left an indelible, positive stamp on the place. His photo hangs outside of our Francis Crick Conference Room as one of the great scientists who worked here.

The current book shows that "attractive things work better" (which is the title of one of Norman's classic essays). Norman dabbles in cognitive, emotional, behavioral and neural science as he makes his key points, showing that "works better" is a multifaceted psychological, emotional, and neural concept. The thesis is much like the ones that permeate clinical psychology in the form of Cognitive-Behavioral therapies (e.g., Beck & Ellis). However, the ideas contained herein inform product design, product choice, and product ownership.

The chapter on "three levels of behavioral design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective" is at the heart of this book (as described by other reviewers), and the one that sticks with me the most. If you are interested in a quick tour of "emotional design", read that chapter and look at the striking yet simple pictures throughout the book. Read some of Norman's amusing stories about objects that he owns... Then, if you are hooked, read the whole book.

I recommend that readers check out some of Norman's interviews and podcasts that coincide with the release of the book. On Norman's website, there is a section titled interviews. Follow the link for NPR's WHYY interview - it is great stuff. Or watch brief the video accompanying the Benjamin Franklin award in Computer and Cogntive Science. Or watch one of the podcasts. Any of these things will help to bring the key design concepts, and Norman's insightful universe, to life. I use these things in the Cognitive Psychology courses that I teach, and I find that they get students talking, and excited, about the interface between congnition, emotion and design.

Great book!

This book is for the most part, a very good distillation of what is good and bad about product design of all kinds. It's subtly humorous and very detailed in its dissection of what makes up a user experience. It ties in very well actually with Alan Cooper's book on software design and vice versa. It's well thought out and adequately concise for the range of topics it covers.

The only problem I really had with this book, was Norman's obsession with robots. The robot section gets a little agonizing to read through, especially with his unsubstantiated claim that they must have human-like emotions. Though his definition of 'robot emotions' technically drifts from that of our own, calling it that is just too close to the general term.

If there's one thing I don't need, it's an angry robot.

Otherwise though, I found it helpful to my work and enjoyable to read.

This is a very good book about the many levels of design. Often, you can get something that works well, but is ugly; conversely, you can get something that looks great but doesn't really work. The great service of this book is that Prof. Norman creates a useful framework to categorise and analyse these things. It is thoughtful, often funny, and in my experience covers the field accurately and concisely.

First, according to Norman, there is the behavioral level, that is, how the thing functions. This is how many people, in particular Americans, approach the objects that they buy: if it works and is durable yet not expensive, it is a good deal. Second, there is the visceral level, which is the (perhaps innate and genetically programmed) reaction that a buyer had to the appearence of something bought. It is about beauty, the appearence of safety, and the like. Third, there is the reflective level, which includes the personal associations of the consumer as well as the intended subtexts that a designer might attempt to incorporate. THe latter two are more favored by the design-loving cultural elites in continental Europe, and they are prepared to pay a lot for them as well as discard still-usable goods for the latest fashion. It is an entirely different mentality and linked to personal pleasure and a sense of emotional satisfaction that come from these objects, which blur the line of design and art.

While all products reflect these three levels, more often than not one is favored by any given firm in the product design process. Target goes for level one with its cheap and useful products, but with Graves' and Starck's designer goods is attempting to appraoch the other levels. With its ironic and - let's admit it - obscure products of the Droog design Collective, the reflective level is favored; for example, its very ugly "dresser" (actually separate drawers lashed together with heavy straps by the consumer) is supposed to remind us of moving and even nomadic life. While I enjoy the idea of these Droog subtexts, I would never want to have one in my house. In contrast, Alessi combines beauty and reflection in some of the best household objects currently manufactured, but they don't always work well; for example, the Starck lemon juicer is beautiful and evokes almost a haunting feeling in some, but you can't really juice lemons with it; or take the (functionally more successful) Mami pots series: they are gently curved, evoking the clay pots of the Italian grandmother's hearth (or even a breast) and yet are simply beautiful. You can't do much better than this in terms of quick analysis with a clear framework. There are also some flashes of humor in the book, which helps it to move along.

Nonetheless, there are many long sections where Norman goes off on tangents that I found uninteresting. Sure, he speculates on innumerable product design possibilities, which may or may not interest (many of them felt like filler to me). But what really bored me was the academic tone of the book, which skims along psych research and in particular cognitive psych. While is makes it more academic, in my opinion it addes nothing to the design insights in the book, which was why I for one bought it.

Many of the reviewers here were hard on Norman for his last two chapters on robotics and artificial intelligence in computers. These are not my field, but I think that his choice to include them is legitimate in that both areas will certainly become a frontier of design in the near future. I got some useful opinions out of it in that I thought about how frustrating computers are and how they could be better.

Recommended with these caveats in mind. I learned a lot from this book.

I looked forward to receiving this book after reading an excerpt. I was partially disappointed. The first half of the book showing why good aesthetics is important was great. The second half dealing with the incorporation of emotions into robots was disappointing. Buy the book for the first half. Also buy Postrel's book on the Substance of Style.