Testing one user early in the project is better than testing fifty near the end.

@skrug

For every dollar a company invests to increase usability, it receives $10-$100 in benefits.

John Karat, IBM Research

When it came time to launch the iPhone, Jobs decided, as usual, to grant a magazine a special sneak preview. He called John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc., and began with his typical superlative: “This is the best thing we’ve ever done.” He wanted to give Time the exclusive, “but there’s nobody smart enough at Time to write it, so I’m going to give it to someone else.” Huey introduced him to Lev Grossman, a savvy technology writer (and novelist) at Time. In his piece Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made a lot of features more usable. “But that’s important. When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid, or not reading the manual or having too fat fingers… When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.

What’s clear, and it’s been said before, is that there’s an opening for a new type of designer. Someone that understands interaction design, product design and can add character to things through behaviour. A light touch. Very subtle in order to make them believable – without them being too ridiculous.

Ben Bashford’s blog post entitled Emoticomp

It’s fascinating to think that personality could be the domain of a new type of designer that would understand psychology, interaction design, and could write with the skill of a novelist. It’s a strange intersection that this person would occupy.

In Bashford’s post, he suggests we start thinking about creating personas for the things we design.

Interaction designers are used to using personas (research based user archetypes) to describe the types of people that will use the thing they’re designing – their background, their needs and the like but I’m not sure if we’ve ever really explored the use of personas or character documentation to describe the product themselves. What does the object want? How does it feel about it? If it can sense its location and conditions how could that affect its behaviour? This kind of thing could be incredibly powerful and would allow us to develop principles for creating the finer details of the object’s behaviour.

That’s an idea I’ve been pondering for a while too, and discussed in my book. I call this design tool a Design Persona. Really fascinating to see other product designers moving in the same direction, and I’d love to see the idea evolve further.

We discovered in our design practice at MailChimp that the design persona was great for starting design concepts, but when it comes to formulating a detailed understanding of the voice of a product, we had to take things further. That’s why we created VoiceAndTone.com, a writing guide with emotion in mind.

• Learn About Design Personas
• About Voice and Tone

Listen to The Web Ahead, Episode 10

Video of Learning to Love Humans Talk in Norway

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

We take our brand very seriously at MailChimp, not because we are hyper brand-nazis, but because our brand is our personality. It’s who we are as individuals and as a collective. We think a lot about how to convey our personality consistently while adapting to different contexts. MailChimp’s Content Curator, @katekiefer, has been pondering how to shape the MailChimp voice while adapting tone to the emotional state of readers. We have a lot of people writing for us, and guiding them into the voice of the brand can be tricky. That’s why we’ve created a simple little website that shows our writers how to use the MailChimp voice. It’s called Voice and Tone.

Designed by @aaronrobbs and built by @wyattdanger, Voice and Tone lists typical content published by MailChimp and identifies the emotional perspective readers are likely to have, which shapes copy tone. As you browse through content types, you’ll notice that the colors change to reflect the reader’s emotional state.

Visitors to Voice and Tone on mobile devices will appreciate it’s responsive layout that accommodates small screens nicely.

Though created as an internal guide, Voice and Tone is a public site because we think there are probably a lot of other companies wresting with similar challenges. We hope this little site will start a conversation both at MailChimp and in the web community.

Visit Voice and Tone

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

Robert Plutchik considered there to be eight primary emotions – anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust, and joy. Plutchik proposed that these ‘basic’ emotions are biologically primitive and have evolved in order to increase the reproductive fitness of the animal. Plutchik argues for the primacy of these emotions by showing each to be the trigger of behavior with high survival value, such as the way fear inspires the fight-or-flight response.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Plutchik

Plutchik created a taxonomy to categorize emotions that groups primary emotional responses and defines their derivative responses as well.

Ten Postulates of Emotion

Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary theory of basic emotions has ten postulates:

1. The concept of emotion is applicable to all evolutionary levels and applies to animals as well as to humans.
2. Emotions have an evolutionary history and have evolved various forms of expression in different species.
3. Emotions served an adaptive role in helping organisms deal with key survival issues posed by the environment.
4. Despite different forms of expression of emotions in different species, there are certain common elements, or prototype patterns, that can be identified.
5. There is a small number of basic, primary, or prototype emotions.
6. All other emotions are mixed or derivative states; that is, they occur as combinations, mixtures, or compounds of the primary emotions.
7. Primary emotions are hypothethical constructs or idealized states whose properties and characteristics can only be inferred from various kinds of evidence.
8. Primary emotions can be conceptualized in terms of pairs of polar opposites.
9. All emotions vary in their degree of similarity to one another.
10. Each emotion can exist in varying degrees of intensity or levels of arousal.

But travel sites don’t get this. They think the source of everyone’s stress is price. They search every carrier and every site for the best deals. That’s cool and all, but I’d pay and extra $50 bucks to not have a 2 hour layover in Detroit, or have to wake up at the butt crack of dawn to get to the airport on time. Deal searching has become the commodity feature of every travel site, and as such they are mostly indistinguishable from one another. That’s a dangerous position for a company to take in a market. They’d be better off zagging while all of their competitors are zigging. That’s the approach travel site newcomer, Hipmunk (figure 1), has taken. Hipmunk fixes the online travel booking problem in two key ways.

Map Time Data to My Mental Model

Travel sites present flight search results in a rather traditional data table format. Row upon row of flight options stack up in the page (figure 2), each with departure and arrival times and the flight duration. Though all of the relevant data you need to make a decision about a purchase is present, it’s not presented in a way that our brains can easily digest. We understand time in a linear, landscape format, but times are shown as data points (ie. 9:27AM to 11:13AM). If we were looking at a single time data point, that isn’t a problem. It’s the mass comparison that makes this format cumbersome for a shopper.

Hipmunk solves the problem with a deft interface design approach. They simply layout travel options the same way that our brains map them, in a parallel landscape format (figure 3). Now you can grasp your options at a glance without repeatedly scrolling through flights trying to form meaningful comparisons.

Filter Options on Agony

Hipmunk gets that flying sucks. In fact sucky is the new flight status quo. You’re flying? Oh, well that’s going to suck. So when you search for a flight the signal of quality the search algorithms should be filtering on is “least pain”.

Hipmunk is the first travel site to search based on “agony” (figure 4). What flight will be the least painful? Sure, you don’t want it to cost your first born, but if the price is not outrageous, chances are most people are going to take that option.

Agony is a rather subjective filtering criteria. Currently, Hipmunk calculates agony based on criteria like how early you’ll have to get up and how long you’ll have to be on a plane. During their recent presentation at Jason Calacanis‘ LAUNCH conference in San Francisco at which I was a judge, the Hipmunk folks promised a more advanced agony filter is in their roadmap.

The Take Away

There are still big problems to be solved on the Web in very well established markets. Solving these problems in new and innovative ways can bring big bucks too. Hipmunk recently received $4.2 million in funding to keep solving these problems in the travel industry. As a user experience designer, what I like about the Hipmunk story is that the opportunities they’re capitalizing on come from meeting user needs, and creating simple, well designed solutions to old problems. Design is still as important as ever.

The workshop was so perfectly timed as the UX Sketchbook I’ve been working on had just rolled off the presses, and it was time to take it for a serious test drive. As I mentioned earlier here, the UX Sketchbook was really designed to support quick ideation, and specifically, sketchboarding.

I snapped a few pics from the conference to document the fun we were having with the new sketchbooks. You can view all of the workshop photos on Flickr.

get your own UX Sketchbook »

I’ve written a short article on UXMag.com about this issue. An excerpt follows:

As UX designers, our role in our industry is more important today than ever. Our medium is maturing into a broad, multiple-platform, always on, multi-context, center-of-our-universe conduit for information. Our clients and customers are demanding more of us. We’re not just designing web experiences anymore. Our designs have to adapt and respond to a variety of devices with different input methods that are used under very different circumstances where user goals and expectations change as well.

read on at UXMag.com »

As the UX lead at MailChimp, I draw a lot of interface ideas, and so do the folks in my team. Sometimes we make detailed drawings of a new feature, or just a rough sketch of an idea to share with a developer or executive.

There are a lot of nice sketchbook options on the market, but nothing really fit our workflow. My colleague Stephen Martin knows a bit about how to make a good sketchbook, and together we have a lot of ideas about how we’d like a UX sketchbook to work. So guess what, we made our own. It’s called The UX Sketchbook.

Here’s what I like about this sketchbook. Each page has a one-up browser window with a grid on one side, and a two-up on the back. When you are at the beginning of an idea, you work through lots of concepts quickly. That’s when you want to use the two-up side. Jot notes in the margins, and even write in the URL in the browser to denote location in the site you’re designing. More refined ideas can stretch out on the one-up side, which also saves room for your notes and annotations in the margins. The perforation of each page makes it easy to tear out a sketch and share with a colleague, or post it to a sketchboard when you are collaborating. The spiral binding keeps it flat on your desk no matter what page you’ve flipped to, and the debossing on the cover adds an extra touch of elegance.

Starting Monday May 16, you can buy these lovely little UX design tools at http://uxsketchbook.com. If iOS design is your bag, you might want to check out Stephen’s iPhone and iPad sketchbooks too, which are popular with industry experts like Josh Clark.

These sketchbooks are simple, and are designed to make you work faster and smarter. We hope you enjoy them in your design practice as much as we do.

buy the UX Sketchbook

InVision offers a clever new way to create prototypes quickly. Design individual screens in your favorite app like Photoshop or Omnigraffle, then upload the entire batch to InVision to add hot spots to create functional workflows. It’s simple, and really fast to use.

Here are some examples of what you can create with InVision: Interactive wireframes or hi-fi prototypes

InVision is still in beta, and therefore is a bit rudimentary. But it’s quite evident that careful consideration has gone into the design of this app, so I am expecting it to evolve into something even more sophisticated very soon. Here are a few features I’d love to see in the future from this lovely little tool:

• form interactions (this is a biggy as it’s har to test an app prototype without real forms)
• easy methods for creating drop down menus, and other in page interactions
• tools for recording usability test sessions

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.

Watch the full interview on FORA.tv

Learn More About the Brain and Emotions

• Antonio Damasio. Brain and mind: from medicine to society
• How the Body Works : Center of Emotion and Memory
• The Brain: Emotions, Neurons, Neurotransmitters

Learn More

• Sketchboards: Discover Better + Faster UX Solutions
• Using Sketchboards to design great User Interfaces quickly
• 6-up Template [PPT]
• 1-up Template [PPT]
• Sketchboard Templates [PDF]
• Tools for Sketching