The Story
From the back of the book:
Make your users fall in love with your site via the precepts packed into this brief, charming book by MailChimp user experience design lead Aaron Walter. From classic psychology to case studies, highbrow concepts to common sense. Designing for Emotion demonstrates accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design.
The Response
The A Book Apart books really are wonderful. This is the second in the series that I’ve read and they’ve both been so well written and have so much information packed into them that they are pretty much a must-have for anyone who works on websites. I’m definitely going to be working my way through the rest of the books, and am very much looking forward to reading them.
This book starts with exploring how humans are emotional beings, how as infants we grasp emotion long before we learn language, and how emotion helps us remember things. It then goes on to explore how we, as website designers and developers, can create a positive emotional experience through giving a personality to our websites that will help users remember our brand so much better. There are case studies that show us how both how this can be done for more lighthearted sites (though the use of humour) and for more serious sites (through a more sober but emotional approach).
One very interesting thing about this book is that it shows exactly how to create a personality profile for a website. This definitely goes hand in hand with style tiles and I would like to start implementing this process to see exactly how much it can help me.
The Bottom Line
Definitely a very enlightening book, and one that I would highly recommend other designers and people working in user experience pick up.
