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The emotional design manifesto
Design emotions, not just experiences.
I have a feeling that this article is going to be slightly different from the rest of the articles I’ve recently seen or read. Everybody seems to be fighting on topics such as “UX designer or Product Designer”? “UX/UI is ok/so wrong!”, “Sketch of Figma?”,”Neuomorphism is a cool/ sh*t trend”!… and so on.
I want to dwell on a topic, that, I believe, is often forgotten by the designer community these days. I want to talk about emotion and feelings. How important they are in terms of product design. And how important they are to me, as a designer.
A brief story of experiences and emotions
It’s 2020. Looking back ten, or even twenty tears ago, when my dad got us our first PC, a lot of things in digital world had tremendously changed.
I was six years old, and I remember interacting with a brand-new PC for the first time — and, to be honest, it was even hard to call it an interface back then.
It was a mix of blue and cyan tables filled with data, governed by this handsome guy called Norton Commander. It looked awfully unfriendly and scary. Repulsive even.
The color palette could literally give you a headache if you looked at it for too long…the contrast was indeed painful. But, with some magic commands, it ran some pretty cool games.
Although the barrier of entry was quite high at that time, people seemed to get used to that interface quite fast. From a usability point of view, we could say, that it was quite usable and functional system.
Nothing fancy, pure simplicity, just some tables and commands, but you could do the essential stuff easily.
I wasn’t really much into computers at that time. Loved playing games, but the whole Norton/MSDOS stuff was creeping me out. As it was quite easy to type something wrong, I was constantly afraid that I will accidentally break something, like delete the whole system or blow up the computer, and my dad would kick me out of the house 😉
