Why are some company’s websites more memorable than others? On the surface, it might seem to have to do with originality, visual impact and branding. But what if I were to tell you that the most important factor is how a site makes a visitor feel?
That’s the premise of a new book by Aaron Walter, the lead user-experience designer for Mail Chimp. Based on the title, Designing for Emotion could have been just another collection of pretty design samples embroidered with squishy commentary. Nothing could be further from the truth. Walter’s approach is direct, rigorous, at times scientific and filled with practical insight and humor. The book is part of the truly excellent A Book Apart series, and Mail Chimp, if you haven’t had a chance to use it, is easily the most pleasurable of the gazillion SAS email marketing platforms out there. So despite the title I found my finger ineluctably moving to the checkout button.
There are a host of interesting books about psychology, design, emotion, and how our brains work that informed my book, Designing for Emotion. Here’s a list of essential books for the shelves of any user experience designer, web designer, or content strategist interested in the topic of emotional design.
Nearly four years ago I stumbled onto a topic that I just can’t get off my mind. As we’ve started to share more of our personal lives online and the barriers of our public personas have begun to crumble, we’ve started speaking with a more authentic voice. The blurred line between personal and professional is starting to influence our expectations of the products and services we seek.
I recently spoke with A Book Apart editor Mandy Brown (@aworkinglibrary) about design, psychology, branding, and finding a place for emotional design in our professional workflow. Our conversation has been published in .net Magazine.
Links and resource came fast and furious in my talk at An Event Apart Boston. To make your life easier, I’ve assembled all of the resources I mentioned into a handy little list. Feel free to share this with your colleagues.
I’m in the process of writing a new book entitled Designing for Emotion to be published by A Book Apart in early 2011.
As part of my research, I’ve been interviewing some designers who are pushing the bounds of emotional design in their work.
Dave Gorum is deftly lacing humor into Carbonmade, a web app that helps designers, artists, and photographers create stellar portfolios. The informal copy, goofy illustration, and unforgettable style of Carbonmade
is helping drive conversions, and creating a loyal fan base of the product. I spoke with Dave recently to learn a little more about the thinking behind his work.
The Web Standards Project and Environments for Humans are proud to announce the launch of InterACT With Web Standards, a book that brings all aspects of web design together for teachers and students. To celebrate the release of the book, several of the expert contributors come together online to give mini-tutorials in their fields of expertise:
User Experience Designer Robert Hoekman Jr has written a pair of wonderfully lucid books that examine best practices in interaction design. In Designing the Obvious, and Designing the Moment, Hoekman extolls the virtues of understanding specific user tasks rather than generalized user personas. It’s easiest to design usable interfaces when the activity it serves is clearly understood.
At SXSW last year I met Michael Nolan – senior acquisitions editor for Peachpit Press – and pitched him my idea for the book Building Findable Websites. Almost one year later the book is in print and on its way to a bookstore near you. read on »
As I have been wrapping up the final chapters of the book, some really kind support has been coming in from some folks I hold in high esteem. When conceptualizing Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond I had hoped to create a natural continuation of Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability and Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards with plenty of practical, real-world-ready examples to illustrate what it takes to make web sites more findable using web standards best practices.
As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I’m currently working on a book to be published by New Riders called Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond. I’ve been teaching a course at The Art Institute of Atlanta called Findability, which teaches students practical solutions for creating findable web content that draws in viewers, and encourages repeat traffic. While researching and developing the course I realized that most of the conversation around the topic is either very theory focused with little practical advice or very SEO/marketing focused appealing to business-minded readers with little knowledge of the way web sites are planned and built.
