Emotional design

But some challenged the blind march toward progress. As mass production expanded in the mid-nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts movement sought to preserve the craftsman’s role in domestic goods production, and with it the human touch. The founders of the Arts and Crafts movement revered the things they designed, built, and used every day. They recognized that a craftsman leaves a bit of themselves in their work, a true gift that can be enjoyed for many years.

In the present day, we can see a few parallels. In a quest for higher crop yields and lower production costs, farms have become headless corporations pitting profits against human welfare. But local farmers are finding new markets as consum-ers search for food produced by people for people. While big-box stores proliferate disposable mass-market goods, websites like Etsy and Kickstarter are empowering artists, craftspeople, and DIY inventors who sell goods they’ve designed and cre-ated. And their customers love the experience. When you buy from an independent craftsman, you support creative thinking and families (not corporations), and you gain the opportunity to live with an object that has a story. That feels good.

We web designers find ourselves in a similar situation. There’s plenty of opportunity to build fast and cheap sites with no reverence for craft or the relationship we build with our audience. We could create new projects with stock pho-tography, boilerplate templates, and one-size-fits-all copy. We could reduce our industry to a commodities race, like those who manufactured the industrial revolution. There is a mar-ket for that kind of work.

Or we could follow a different path, one paved by the art-ists, designers, and architects of the Arts and Crafts move-ment, who believed that preserving the human touch and showing ourselves in our work isn’t optional. It’s essential.
I’m delighted to report that many on the web are already on this path. I’ll guide you through examples of the principles that emotional design visionaries use not only to build a human connection with their audience, but also to fuel their success. There’s a common thread through these principles—emotional design—which uses psychology and craftsman-ship to create an experience for users that makes them feel Like there’s a person, not a machine, at the other end of the connection.

It’s taken our medium time to mature to where we can begin exploring emotional design and talking to our audience with a new voice. Once upon a time, on a web not so unlike the one we enjoy today, we spoke much differently because we hadn’t yet learned to be ourselves. We were still trying to be the machine.

THE WAY WE WERE

The web had a rocky start in building emotional connections. It gets gold stars for connecting people in far-off lands, but the necessities of academia were the mother of its inventions—a dry origin indeed. As business pioneers discovered new watering holes, the web quickly became a breeding ground of dot-com bubble thinking. I remember writing copy for my personal website in the late 1990s using the royal “we,” trying to create the perception that I was a big company when the guy behind those words was in his bedroom in smelly paja-mas trying to figure out HTML. I wasn’t trying to be me—I was trying to be like the other big players out there.

But something happened to that trend in the middle of the naughts. All of those people who were laid off or fired after the dot-com bubble burst either started new companies or re-treated to their bedrooms and stayed in pajamas to make new websites and applications.
Maybe it was because a boss wasn’t standing over their shoulder, or maybe they needed to do something to lift their spirits, but the voice of these new sites was decidedly more personal.

During this period, Flickr launched with the famously familiar and endearing copy that puts smiles on so many faces. Facebook and Twitter surfaced and influenced the voice of the web. These new social tools allowed users to share the minutiae of daily life. That may not sound terribly profound, but it represents a major change in the way that we commu-nicate on the web. Whereas professionalism might have but-toned down our communiqués before social networks, today  conversations are often more true to the way that we’d speak to friends. Of course, a little moderation is sometimes in order (I’m looking at you, Rainn Wilson, http://bkaprt.com/de/1; fig 1.1).

The curtain has been drawn back, exposing our humor, grumpiness, concern, stress, and all the other emotions that season our days. As we’ll see in Chapter 3, this honesty is creeping into the personalities we craft for our businesses, and our users are beginning to expect the websites and web applications they visit to reflect a personality that they can relate to.

This book is chock-full of examples of a design sensibil-ity that is distinctly human, individual, reflective of a real personality, and honest—all while keeping business goals in mind. You might have some trepidation about how to imple-ment emotional design techniques without boiling your boss’s blood. We’ll see practical, real-world examples designed to inspire and support your case for employing emotional design in your next project. I’ll even share a bevy of data to help you make an empirical case for emotional design.

Keep in mind that ignoring human needs is not a history we are doomed to repeat. Through our designs, we can see and connect with other human beings. So where do we start? Well, like any good user experience designer, we begin by understanding the needs of the people we’re designing for.

HELLO, MASLOW

In the 1950s and 60s, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow discovered something that we all knew but had yet to put into words: no matter our age, gender, race, or station in life, we all have basic needs that must be met. Maslow illus-trated his ideas in a pyramid he called the Hierarchy of Needs (fig 1.2).

Maslow stressed that the physiological needs at the base of this hierarchy must be met first. The need to breathe, eat, sleep, and answer the call of nature trump all other needs in our life. From there, we need a sense of safety. We can’t be happy if we fear bodily harm, loss of family, property, or a job. Next, we need a sense of belonging. We need to feel loved and intimately connected to other humans. This helps us get to the next level: a sense of self, a respect for others, and the confidence we need to excel in life. At the top of Maslow’s pyramid is a broad, but important category—self-actualization. Once all other needs are met, we can fulfill our need to be cre-ative, to solve problems, and to follow a moral code to serve others.

Maslow’s approach to identifying human needs can help us understand our goals when designing interfaces. We could certainly live contented lives meeting only the bottom three strata of the needs pyramid—physiological comfort, safety, and belonging. But it’s in that top layer that we can live a truly fulfilled life.

Interface design is design for humans. What if we trans-lated Maslow’s model of human needs into the needs of our users? It might look something like this (fig 1.3):