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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
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• HTML5 – Chris Mills
• CSS3 – Aarron Walter
• Accessibility – Derek Featherstone
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This event is free for students and educators, so wand seating is limited. Reserve your space while you can. http://interactsummit.eventbrite.com

h.what? – The Conversation podcast

Aral shares some interesting insights into how he is encouraging emotional engagement in his app.

Aarron: How does great design impact a user’s propensity to forgive usability shortcomings, or technical snafus?

Aral: I reject the premise of the question. Great design is design that has few usability shortcomings and technical snafus. Delighters can very easily become a mocking of the user if the base features of the app do not function properly. It’s wrong to see design as separate from usability. We fall into this trap often in our industry because we call everything “design”. What we’re really talking about is interaction design here. It includes elements of graphic design, to be sure, but there is an all-important non-linear, interactive core to interaction design that includes usability. It’s far closer to product design. It includes technical competence. Good user experience is a function of all these elements.

Before your application can create an emotional relationship with the user it must get the basics right. The emotional relationship, the delight, is what you layer on top of this base usability and technical competency.

So yes, if you can create a positive emotional relationship with your users, they may be more forgiving if something goes wrong. But maybe once, maybe twice… if the core of your application isn’t competent you will soon erode that relationship and it may even backfire. Make sure your app competent before considering adding delight to it. Competency is a prerequisite to delight.

Aarron: How does design impact a user’s trust?

Aral:We do judge a book by its cover; it’s an evolutionary trait. We make split second judgements everyday about whether something is friend is foe. In the past, this meant the difference between life and death (and can still do so today, in a dimly lit alleyway, for instance). It’s no surprise that we apply the same, unconscious categorization to designed objects.

However, design is a marriage of form and function. The latter is usually forgotten. Apple’s products are not successful just because they are shiny and beautiful but because they are a joy to use also. So, while looks may initially affect trust, it is function (or rather, the marriage of form and function) that will affect the long-term health of a product.

Aarron: Do you consciously consider emotion in your design work?

Aral:Definitely. My apps are an extension of my character. I see them as authored works; as a conversation. There is a lot of myself in there and I want to have pleasurable, fun conversations with my users. Most of our industry is still talking about features this and features that – the age of features is dead, we’re living in the age of user experience; _execution_ is everything. We should be talking about building empathy into apps – does the app try to understand what the user is feeling and react accordingly? In ‘Avit, for example, if you have a slow internet connection, the little Manto blob gets ashamed, apologizes, even bursts into tears if it takes to long. Even though the problem isn’t with the app itself (slow Internet connection), the app tries to emphatize with the user. It doesn’t just display an indeterminate progress indicator that is emotionless and uncaring.

The bit about how _your_ character is reflected in your apps is important because if your character is a dry, corporate one than that’s what will come across. You have to be genuine. Take the Microsoft Office paperclip as an example. There’s a perfect example of emotional design gone wrong. Why? You have to ask yourself: whose emotions? Whose character? When I see the paperclip, I see Steve Ballmer in paperclip form – it’s everything that people hate about Microsoft (the arrogance, etc.)

Aarron: Feathers has a uniquely cute interface that is atypical of most iPhone apps. Why is that? How does the bird character impact user experience?

Aral:It’s partly because of the target audience – a younger crowd (young at heart?) :) Partly, because the app itself is meant to be fun. Feathers isn’t going to cure world hunger, but it might make Twitter more fun for you. It might help you put a smile on someone’s face with a tweet. And I wanted the interface – and everything about it; the site, the screencast; etc. – to reflect that light, fun, tone. I smile a lot when speaking to people (which really sucks when you have something stuck in your teeth); I wanted the interface to smile too. I tried to translate my smile into a UI.

On the bird character, here are a few tweets I got within hours of Feathers’ launch – you decide :)

@aral I really *LOVE* the singing bird when you send a tweet, twitter is fun all of a sudden!

Very cool feedback via the feathers bird to let you know your char limit. Excellent job @aral

Confession: Sometimes I make too long Feathers-tweets, just to watch the bird turn red. (@feathers_app) :D

Aarron: You’ve show a lot of emotion in ‘Avit as well. Can you talk a little about why that is and how you are trying to shape the user experience?

Aral:Think about how much time we spend interacting with virtual experiences today; on our notebooks, mobile phones, TV sets… User Experience today affects such a large proportion of our lives that we might soon drop the “user” altogether: The stuff we’re designing today affects people’s experiences; their lives. A good user experience today may mean the difference between someone having a good day or a bad day. And there are a lot of bad experiences today. They affect people’s lives negatively. They affect _my life_ negatively. I’m cognisant that, in some small way, the experiences I create can make people happy or they can make them frustrated, angry, and upset. That’s why I spend so much time on – and focus so heavily on – designing the interaction of my apps: I want my apps to make people happy. I want them to get joy out of using them. These are words that we should be using every day when discussing what we’re trying to build – we’re in the business of manufacturing joy and delight, making people’s lives better in small ways; building emphatetic apps.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Wanna hear more about how you can make your website or application more pleasurable to use? There are still a few seats available in Boston.

Read the Article – Emotional Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users

I spoke with Mark about the design work he is doing. Below is the transcript from our conversation:

Aarron: Convertbot and Weightbot have been successful in a large part because of the engaging design. The interfaces use personification to build emotional connections with users. Can you talk a bit about your design strategy with these apps, and how personality in interface design has impacted the success of Tapbots apps?

Mark: The whole UI concept was really inspired by the movie, Wall•e. They were designed in a way that you could practically guess their function by the way they looked. I really loved that. So when we set out to design Weightbot, I wanted it to resemble a typical weight scale. With Convertbot, we wanted it to feel like it was in the same robot family, yet was designed specifically for the purpose of converting units.

Our concept for the first 2 apps was selling our apps as if they were physical robots. That’s why the icons resemble the interface. We also gave the icons eyes to humanize them a bit. But we use this idea as a selling point and not to distract the user in the actual app. We want our apps to be used seriously, but also give the sense that they are more than just a piece of software.

We did want our users to have an emotional connection to our apps. Most people don’t have a love/joy for software like geeks do. When I switched to the Mac (from Windows), I began to appreciate software design and found great joy in using software that was carefully crafted. Our goal was for everyone to be able to feel like that about software.

Aarron: Some of the interactions in your apps are a bit atypical for iPhone apps. For example, the spin to select interaction pattern in Convertbot could have easily been a series of simple buttons instead. How do the slightly more sophisticated interaction patterns you design influence user experience?

Mark: Again, the goal for this was to make it feel more like interacting with a physical device rather than just software. We wanted to create an experience around what’s normally just a mundane utility.

Aarron: The Tapbots brand experience is cute, informal, yet elegant, which I think creates a sense of fun and joy around your products. Can you talk about how intentional that outcome is, and maybe point out some specific examples of how you shape your brand experience?

Mark: A lot of the look and feel of the brand comes from my art style in general. But our goal was to create a brand with a positive vibe to it. Even our interface has somewhat of a cartoony feel to it. Our goal wasn’t to make it LOOK as realistic as possible. We really wanted it to FEEL real.

The paragraph on our About page really says it all about our company:

“Tapbots are utility robots designed and engineered for your iPhone and iPod touch. Our applications are easy to use, focused, and lots of fun. These amazing little robots are dreamed up and brought to life by Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine. We slave the night away creating—not to make a quick buck, but because we love software. We hope our robots will create the same love for software that we have.”

We wrote that early on and keep it in mind with each app we release.

I should note that our 3rd app Pastebot is a slight departure in the sense that it follows more of the UI guidelines provided by Apple. This is mainly because of the type of app it is. It’s mainly driven by user-generated content and can get quite complex so trying to create a completely new experience wasn’t ideal. We also wanted to take a risk and see how it would work out.

Here’s who will be speaking:

• HTML5 Workshop presented by Molly Holzschlag
• CSS3 Workshop presented by Christopher Schmitt
• Microformats Workshop presented by Emily Lewis
• Findability Workshop presented by Aarron Walter (hey, that’s me!)

Want to attend all of these workshops for free? Simply tweet the following message by noon (ET/-5 GMT) Jan 13 for your chance to win a free pass (that’s a $749.00 value in case you’re counting):

Get 10% off HTML5, CSS3, Microformats, and Findability online workshops with discount code WKSHOPAARRONW http://ow.ly/T1xh /via @aarron

I will announce the winner on Twitter on January 13. Follow @aarron to see if you won.