Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
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.
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.
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.
Psychologist Robert Plutchik’s research on emotion and its evolutionary origins provides fascinating insights and foundational theory for those of us exploring emotional design.
I travel a lot, so I end up spending more time on travel booking sites than I’d like. When you’re planning for a trip there’s just so much on your mind. You’ve got to figure out your schedule, who’s going to pick you up at the airport, what the weather’s going to be like, and you have to make plans with people at your destination. All of these things have some bearing on the flight you need to book. If you’re like me, you wait until the last minute to book your flight because it’s just such a hassle to figure it all out. It’s a lot of stress. When I go to book a flight, I just want to find one that is going to inflict the least amount of pain.
