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.

Read Kosner’s article on Forbes.com

A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule The Future

David H. Pink

The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.

Drawing on research from around the world, Pink outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment-and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that’s already here.

buy the book

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

Donald Norman

Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colorful iMac? New research on emotion and cognition has shown that attractive things really do work better, as Donald Norman amply demonstrates in this fascinating book, which has garnered acclaim everywhere from Scientific American to The New Yorker.Emotional Design articulates the profound influence of the feelings that objects evoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on Gucci bags and Rolex watches, to the impact of emotion on the everyday objects of tomorrow.Norman draws on a wealth of examples and the latest scientific insights to present a bold exploration of the objects in our everyday world. Emotional Design will appeal not only to designers and manufacturers but also to managers, psychologists, and general readers who love to think about their stuff.

buy the book

Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences

Stephen Anderson

What happens when you’ve built a great website or app, but no one seems to care? How do you get people to stick around long enough to see how your service might be of value? In Seductive Interaction Design, speaker and author Stephen P. Anderson takes a fresh approach to designing sites and interactions based on the stages of seduction. This beautifully designed book examines what motivates people to act.

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A General Theory of Love

Thomas Lewis M.D., Fari Amini M.D., Richard Lannon M.D.

Drawing comparisons to the most eloquent science writing of our day, three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain. The result is an original, lucid, at times moving account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being.

A General Theory of Love draws on the latest scientific research to demonstrate that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.

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Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

Antonio Damasio

Since Descartes famously proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am,” science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—”one of the world’s leading neurologists” (The New York Times)—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.

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The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

Antonio Damasio

How is it that we know what we know? How is it that our conscious and private minds have a sense of self? A gifted medical clinician and scientific thinker, Damasio helps readers to ask and answer questions about what it is to be human. His elegant investigation of feeling and emotion offers a new understanding of the conscious mind and, as the New York Times has noted, “will change your experience of yourself.”

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Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

Antonio Damasio

Joy, sorrow, jealousy, and awe—these and other feelings are the stuff of our daily lives. In the seventeenth century, the philosopher Spinoza devoted much of his life’s work examining how these emotions supported human survival, yet hundreds of years later the biological roots of what we feel remain a mystery. Leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio—whose earlier books explore rational behavior and the notion of the self—rediscovers a man whose work ran counter to all the thinking of his day, pairing Spinoza’s insights with his own innovative scientific research to help us understand what we’re made of, and what we’re here for.

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How The Mind Works

Steven Pinker

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller How the Mind Works is a fascinating, provocative work exploring the mysteries of human thought and behavior. How do we see in three dimensions? How do we remember names and faces? How is it, indeed, that we ponder the nature of our own consciousness? Why do we fall in love? In this bold, extraordinary book, Pinker synthesizes the best of cognitive science and evolutionary biology to explain what the mind is, how it has evolved, and, ultimately, how it works. This edition includes a new afterword that explores the impact of the book and its relevance today.

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Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

John Medina

See how the brain works while using it in the process of reading this book! Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know – like that physical activity boosts your brain power.

How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget – and so important to repeat new information? Is it true that men and women have different brains?

In Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist, shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule – what scientists know for sure about how our brains work – and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives.

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The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals

Charles Darwin

Published in 1871, this book explores the universality of emotional expression in humans regardless of culture, and even in animals.

download the book free

Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution

Phillip Prodger

Darwin’s Camera tells the extraordinary story of how Charles Darwin changed the way pictures are seen and made.

In his illustrated masterpiece, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1871), Darwin introduced the idea of using photographs to illustrate a scientific theory–his was the first photographically illustrated science book ever published. Using photographs to depict fleeting expressions of emotion–laughter, crying, anger, and so on–as they flit across a person’s face, he managed to produce dramatic images at a time when photography was famously slow and awkward. The book describes how Darwin struggled to get the pictures he needed, scouring the galleries, bookshops, and photographic studios of London, looking for pictures to satisfy his demand for expressive imagery. He finally settled on one the giants of photographic history, the eccentric art photographer Oscar Rejlander, to make his pictures. It was a peculiar choice. Darwin was known for his meticulous science, while Rejlander was notorious for altering and manipulating photographs. Their remarkable collaboration is one of the astonishing revelations in Darwin’s Camera.

Darwin never studied art formally, but he was always interested in art and often drew on art knowledge as his work unfolded. He mingled with the artists on the voyage of HMS Beagle, he visited art museums to examine figures and animals in paintings, associated with artists, and read art history books. He befriended the celebrated animal painters Joseph Wolf and Briton Riviere, and accepted the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner as a trusted guide. He corresponded with legendary photographers Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, and G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne, as well as many lesser lights. Darwin’s Camera provides the first examination ever of these relationships and their effect on Darwin’s work, and how Darwin, in turn, shaped the history of art.

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And of course, there’s this little book too.

Designing for Emotion

Aarron Walter

Make your users fall in love with your site via the precepts packed into this brief, charming book by MailChimp user experience design lead Aarron 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.

buy the book

The sites, products, and brands that resonate most with people today are the ones that are human, honest and have a clear personality. It’s through personality and emotion that companies are forging real relationships with their customers and standing out in a sea of competitors. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. There are others in the UX community and even in the VC and startup communities that are seeing a serious shift towards designing for emotion.

I’ve been wondering, how should designers, startups, UX folks and companies rethink how they present themselves and become more human? How do we go about making products feel like people? How do transcend usability and create experiences that are delightful? These are the questions that sparked the research and ideas presented in my new book, Designing for Emotion.

Packed into this tiny, purple volume you’ll find core principles of psychology, a plethora of case studies, techniques that will help you make a human connection through design and data that will convince skeptical management. This book is the culmination of four years of experimenting with emotional design in my work, more than a year of research, and countless interviews with other web and product designers who are uncovering new connections between design and emotion.

It’s so gratifying to hold the culmination of these efforts in my hands, and how cool it is to see it on tablet devices too. French, Korean, and Russian readers will be happy to know that translations are in the works.

I have endless hugs and high fives for the brilliant folks that helped me craft this book. Jeffrey, Mandy, Jason, Krista, Rob, Whitney, Rose and Jared, I thank you for making this little purple book sing.

I hope you enjoy Designing for Emotion, and I hope it inspires your work. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the book and your perspective on emotional design.

Mobile First

It’s an honor to publish with A Book Apart, but it’s twice as nice to have Designing for Emotion launch along side Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski. The mobile experience is no longer a “nice to have” feature in a project. It’s essential. Luke’s book will walk you through core mobile design strategies and help you see how central mobile design is to all interface design. It’s an amazing book that I am certain you’ll enjoy.

Read the Interview

Keep an eye on my SlideShare account for the slide deck from this presentation, which will be released once the AEA season has come to a close.

• Design Personas Template and Example
• The story behind the illustrations in the presentation created by Mike Rhode
• Dribbble
• Huffduffer
• Sketchboards
• Mustache for inserting data into your prototypes
• Keynote Kung Fu
• Mocking Bird
• Balsamiq
• Pattern Tap
• Yahoo Design Patterns
• MailChimp Design Pattern Library
• Object Oriented CSS by Nicole Sullivan
• jQuery Tools
• NextPint: Beer Social
• Kevin Rose’s Foundation Podcast

Books

• Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide by Todd Zaki Warfel
• Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowles and James Box
• Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell

You might also be interested in …

I compiled a massive list of handy UX resources for a workshop I did recently.

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.

Dave Gorum on Designing for Emotion in Carbonmade

I wonder if you could share with me a little back story on where the design and illustration aesthetic in Carbonmade comes from?

My policy on the brand from the beginning was to make it fun. I was the only designer at the start which put me in the pretty awesome position of being able to do whatever I wanted design and illustration-wise. Sign-up button needs to be weighted heaviest on the page? Wrap it in a yellow octopus! Need a memorable logomark, but can’t make a logo worth a damn? Doodle your best friend with a unicorn horn! My rule was and is to add fun up to the point that distracts from the message.

There’s a lovely sense of humor and informality in the design and language of the site and app. How does that impact your interactions with your customers? How does it set your apart from your competitors?

Thanks! We’ve made an effort to take a solid design foundation and dress it up with interesting copy and silly images. Keeping things informal and bonkers makes it all the easier to get folks to click that Sign-up button. There’s a taper to the silliness though. We lay it on pretty thick in our marketing site, dial it back a bit in our admin tools, and remove it all together on the product. It’s like a giant, flashy, goofy piece of candy on the outside, with a Swiss-engineered, straight-laced nougaty center! That was a metaphor.

For the most part our customers love us. The informality makes it super easy to open a dialogue. We’re like their goofy friend who’s really easy to talk to and can make them a sweet portfolio.

If anything, the smirking goofiness lets our competitors feel comfortable about not taking us seriously. Which is juuuuust fine.

Do you ever get backlash regarding the informal personality of your brand?

With anything that’s over the top you run the risk of alienating folks, but that’s alright. Our users either love the brand and have no qualms about letting it represent them, or don’t give it a second thought because the product takes care of their portfolio needs. The end result is that we have happy users, and that’s as good as it gets.

• Learning More Effectively on the Web – Denise Jacobs
• Content Strategy – Glenda Sims
• HTML5 – Chris Mills
• CSS3 – Aarron Walter
• Accessibility – Derek Featherstone
• InterACT in the Classroom – Leslie Jensen-Inman

This event is free for students and educators, so wand seating is limited. Reserve your space while you can. http://interactsummit.eventbrite.com

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.

Designing the Obvious contains a canon of heuristics developed from careful study of user behavior. As the title suggests, with knowledge of user expectations, and a little understanding of design patterns, an interface can make the steps to performing a task obvious.

Designing the Moment picks up where its predecessor leaves off by pointing out that each smaller interaction adds up to a bigger experience. This book is all about defining our user’s goals, and identifying how we can best help them achieve them.

The conversational tone of Hoekman’s writing and the bounty of compelling, real-world examples he uses to drive home each principle make porting his recommendations into your practice easy. These books read easy, and contain lots of practical information that’s sure to be applicable to your next website or application design project.

To enter simply head on over to Facebook and join the Building Findable Websites group. Once you’ve joined post your favorite ideas, tips, and/or tricks to making websites findable in the discussion thread entitled “The one thing you can do to help the findability of your site is … ”.

If you’re not the Facebook type then post your findability ideas as a comment on this blog post and you’ll be added to the drawing. A winner will be selected at random on April 7th, 2008 so get your entry in beforehand. I’ll announce the winner right here and will ship the book directly to the lucky devil’s doorstep.

Good luck and may the force be with you!

Now that the manuscript has been transformed into a glossy cover-wrapped volume, I thought I’d share with you my experience. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to devote yourself to a single topic for such an extended period of time, and how the publishing process works. It’s something that is often romanticized as an extended, solitary expedition into deep, meaningful thoughts. Although there’s a bit of romance in the writing process, there’s also a lot of research, attention to form and continuity, second guessing of yourself, and old fashioned hard work along the way.

As a teacher for nearly a decade, I’ve become accustomed to reading my student’s faces to determine whether or not I’m making any sense. Writing doesn’t afford this luxury. For months on end I wrote and wrote sometimes wondering if my extensive passages would provide enough information to the reader to help them grasp my point, or maybe I was getting too detailed which could be patronizing and slow. Of course, my editors Jeff Riley, and Jonathan Snook helped me answer these internal questions along the way, but the feedback loop is a lot different than explaining something in person and changing tack immediately when you see your message isn’t hitting its mark. Somewhere along the way I got over the second guessing and plowed ahead. After chapter 3 I felt like I had found my stride, and the overall structure of the book started to become more apparent.

The Process of Publishing and the People Involved

There were a lot of people involved in the publishing process – a whole team, in fact. As the acquisitions editor, Michael Nolan received my written proposal for the book and a sample chapter then presented it to a board of publishing gurus at Peachpit who evaluated its relevance to the target audience, looked at other books that already explored similar topics, and made a final decision on whether or not to publish it. This was a pretty slow process. I submitted the proposal in April then bit my nails until late July when the official green light was handed down. The writing process didn’t start until August of 2007 -six months after my initial conversation with Michael. After the proposal was accepted Michael acted as the project manager for the book, coordinating the entire team.

Jeff Riley was my development editor. His job was to provide feedback on the form and structure of my writing. He evaluated all formatting for consistency, passed each chapter on to Jonathan Snook the technical editor who evaluated all code and techy concepts, then passed the combined edits and feedback to me. I then made the requested changes or decided to stick to my guns at times and leave things as they were. My changes went back to Jeff for another pass and prep for the production team who handled the formatting and layout.

While I was writing, the design team was working on the page layout and various elements that would be included in each chapter. They used a sample chapter to design the treatments for tables, figures, captions, tips, and various sidebar elements. This was shared with me for feedback, and revised one more time before placing the manuscript into the page templates.Kate Reber – the production editor – coordinated all of the pre-press production of the book. Once she had all of the content into the design we went through each chapter three times to tweak the layout and catch any oversights. A proof reader also went through the entire book a few times again checking for errata and inconsistencies. I’m not sure how many times we all read the book, but I think I read through each page about 8 to 10 times. I think I could now recite it from cove to cover.

A Little Overzealous – Too Many Chapters

I had a lot to say on the subject of findability, so much so that I wrote 5 chapters too many to fit in the book. I started to get nervous about the length in October, and by December we realized that there was roughly 106 pages too many. I felt like I was lopping limbs off of my first born as we excised chapters to make the target length, but luckily all of this content is published on the book’s companion website http://buildingfindablewebsites.com as free PDF downloads. Although these chapters aren’t in print, they’re not lost.

It’s extremely satisfying to wrap up such a long, intense process and hold the final product in your hands. I hope this book achieves my original goal – to create a better awareness of findability and its close relationship to web standards best practices. You can join the findability discussion in the Facebok group.

If you are going to be at SXSW this year or any of the other conferences where I’ll be speaking, please do introduce yourself. I’d love to hear your perspective on the book.

Here’s what these paragons of the Web industry are saying in support of the book:

Companies waste fortunes seeking a magic bullet for Search Engine Optimization. But the keys to honest, effective web findability are appropriate writing and semantic markup. Aarron Walter’s wonderfully lucid and informative book tells everything you need to know to get your web content (or your client’s) in front of as many appreciative readers as possible.

Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found. In Building Findable Web Sites, Aarron Walter provides an invaluable guide to avoiding obscurity on today’s cluttered Web.

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.

My book is written for designers/developers who build web sites day in day out. It has three primary goals:

• Help people find your web site.
• Help people find what they are looking for once they arrive at your site.
• Bring your audience back to your web site.

All of the code solutions offered in the book follow web standards best practices, incorporate accessibility recommendations, and address the findability of some contemporary technologies such as Ajax, Microformats, and Flash to name just a few.As the title suggests, SEO is an important part of the book, but findability encompasses many other facets of the web project life cycle too. To give you a sneak peek at what you can expect to learn from the book here’s an abbreviated table of contents.

1. Introducing Findability
   • What is findability?
   • The development side of findability
   • The deepest desires of search engines
   • Beyond SEO
   • Get your team on board
   • Using your moral compass to guide your way
2. Markup Strategies
   • A web standards primer
   • Web standards and findability sitting in a tree …
   • Accessible content is findable content
   • The findability benefits of Microformats
3. Server-Side Strategies
   • Files and folders: the power of a name
   • Choosing and managing domain names
   • Building search engine friendly URLs
   • Getting users back on track with custom 404 pages
   • Moving pages with 301 redirets
   • Optimizing site performance for efficient indexing
   • Choosing a search engine friendly CMS or framework
4. Building Content that Drives Traffic
   • Creating content that sucks (users in)
   • Content karma
   • The mark of quality content
   • Content of many flavors
   • Targeting keywords in your content
   • Content development strategies (various RSS parsing examples)
5. Building a Findable Blog
   • Blogging best practices to improve findability
   • Making your WordPress blog more findable
6. Adding Search to Your Site
   • Using free search systems (Google CSE, Google Ajax Search API, Rollyo, etc.)
   • Using paid search systems
   • Building your own simple product search system
   • Adding OpenSearch to your site
7. Preventing Findability Roadblocks
   • Avoiding JavaScript pitfalls (progressive enhancement, scripted styles, scripted navigation, and Ajax content)
   • Findable Flash
   • Findable audio and video
8. Free Search Engine Tools and Services
   • Building and submitting sitemap.xml
   • Google Webmaster Central services
   • Getting info about your site with Yahoo! Site Explorer
9. Viral Marketing
   • A virus you’ll want to spread
   • Passing the virus to new hosts
   • Building a viral product
10. Places to Promote Your Site
11. Bringing Traffic Back with a Mailing List
12. Places to Promote Your Site
13. Spotting Traffic Trends with Web Analytics
14. Techniques to Avoid and How to Recover From Mistakes
15. Findability Strategy Checklist

These last few chapters are still under development, which is why I’ve only listed their title. There will be bonus chapters available for free on the companion site (once it’s built). The entire book is filled with practical code examples that could be used in any project to improve your site’s findabilty, and avoids the marketing speak typical of other books that address some of these topics.If you have suggestions of content you’d like to see included in the book, please comment on this post. although I can’t guarantee it will make it in the book, I can do my nest to make sure the info you want is available on the companion web site at the very least.

• The Elements of Typographic Style (alternatively, go with Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type if you are new to the subject)
• Universal Principles of Design
• Bulletproof Web Design
• Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition)
• DOM Scripting
• Designing Interfaces
• Don’t Make Me Think or The Design of Everyday Things
• The PHP Anthology: Object Oriented PHP Solution, Volume 1
• AIGA Professional Practices in Graphic Design
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

With this little library, you’ll be able to plan, design, and build a professional web site from start to finish. The basic principles of design, typography, interaction design, Information Architecture, Usability, Web Standards development, and operating as a freelancer are covered in detail in these books. Anything more you might need to know can probably be found online for free.

SitePoint also has a nice book on Ajax entitled Build Your Own Ajax Web Applications. This book is focused specifically on Ajax, not so much about connecting client-side to server-side scripts.

“Five Simple Steps: Designing for the web is a web design book with a difference. Too many design books show pretty pictures and don’t actually teach much. Five Simple Steps: Designing for the Web changes this by focusing on applying the core principles of graphic design to the web.”

- Mark Boulton