011 min
Why Emotional Design began with a color monitor
Don Norman, a cognitive scientist, once borrowed a color display to find out whether color helps people work. Early personal computers showed only black and white, and researchers had found no measurable gain from adding color. After his trial, Norman agreed with them: color added nothing to his everyday work. Then he refused to give the display back. His own reasoning told him that color did not matter, but his feeling about the screen told him the opposite.
That mismatch bothered him because of what he had already published. His 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things made usability the test of a good object, and many readers took it as a case against beauty. In 2002 he wrote that he had meant something narrower. He wanted usability to count as much as beauty, not more, and he had left aesthetics out because he assumed other writers covered it.
So he needed to explain a preference that no usability test could measure. He found the explanation in research on affect. Affect is the quick feeling of good or bad that a person has about something before thinking it through. Norman published the result in 2002 and expanded it into the book Emotional Design in 2004.
022 min
How Emotional Design changes the way people think
Norman describes two systems that both process information. The cognitive system works out what is happening. The affective system judges, and it judges first: it marks what a person sees as good or bad, safe or risky, before careful thought starts. Each system acts on the other, so the quick judgment changes how the slow thinking goes.
The change has a direction. A tense or threatened mood narrows attention. The person concentrates on one problem and ignores distractions, which is useful when danger is real. A calm, pleased mood does the opposite. Attention widens, the person tries more options, and distraction comes more easily. Norman's 2002 paper states this as a rule: a good mood helps creative thinking that tests many ideas, and a bad mood helps focused thinking that follows one.
For design, the first half of that rule matters most. When people feel good, they tolerate small faults and find ways around them. A pleasant product can therefore be easier to use in practice, even when its looks add no information. This is the claim behind Norman's phrase that attractive things work better. He adds that pleasing things are easier to learn, a point that writers on online training repeat.
Isen's experiments on mood and creative problem solving
Norman relies on experiments by the psychologist Alice Isen. In 1987 she and two colleagues ran four studies. They put some people in a good mood, either by showing a short comedy film or by giving them a small bag of candy. Those people then did better on two creativity tasks. One was the candle task, where a person must fix a candle to a corkboard wall so that it burns without dripping wax, using only a box of tacks, a candle and a book of matches. The solution is to tack the box to the wall and use it as a platform for the candle.
Two other groups did not improve in the same way: people put in a bad mood, and people who did physical exercise. The exercise groups were included to show that the effect came from feeling good, not from being more alert.
032 min
The three levels of Emotional Design
Norman and the psychologist Andrew Ortony set the idea out in a model with two views of one product. The designer works with appearance and function. The user reacts at three levels, and each level responds to a different thing. The library covers the first and third levels in their own entries, visceral design and reflective design, so this is the short version.
| Level | What the user reacts to | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Visceral | Appearance, through the senses | Automatic and set by biology, so largely shared across cultures |
| Behavioral | Use: how the product performs and feels | Learned skill, driven by expectations about what happens next |
| Reflective | Meaning: brand, status and self-image | Conscious, and shaped by culture, age and fashion |
The visceral reaction is an automatic check of what the senses report, and it sorts things into safe or dangerous, inviting or off-putting. It uses no memory and no expectation, only what is in front of the person now.
The behavioral level is learned, so it depends on expectation. People predict how an object should respond, and when it lets them down they feel it. Norman and Ortony note that people sometimes hit or kick an object that fails them.
The reflective level is where a person thinks about the product and about themselves. Norman and Ortony place pride, shame, admiration and gratitude here, because only here does the person interpret what they feel. A product is judged on all three levels at once, so a design that fails one level can undo what it gained on another.
042 min
Do attractive things work better? What the studies found
The model makes a prediction that a researcher can test. If a good first reaction affects later judgment, a product that looks better should seem easier to use. That link is now known as the aesthetic-usability effect.
Two Japanese researchers tested it with ATM screens
Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura ran the first test in 1995. Kurosu and Kashimura showed 26 designs of cash machine screens to groups of people, and each person rated every design for beauty and for ease of use. The two ratings moved together strongly, with a correlation of 0.59. A correlation measures how closely two sets of numbers move together: 1 means they match perfectly and 0 means there is no link. At the time, beauty was a minor topic in human-computer interaction research, so the result was a surprise.
Tractinsky tried to prove it wrong
Noam Tractinsky read the study at the conference and doubted it. He suspected the result might hold only in Japan, a country with a long tradition of aesthetics, and might come partly from how the ratings were collected. He ran three studies in Israel, reported at a computing conference in 1997. In the second and third he separated the beauty and ease questions and then randomized their order, to remove that bias. The link between beauty and apparent ease of use held in Israel and after the method was improved.
Where the evidence stops
Both studies measured what people believed, not what they did. A team from University College London and Imperial College London added that measurement in 2005. They asked twelve master's students to use search tools that showed results as different visualizations. The students rated beauty and ease of use before and after each task, while the researchers recorded errors and time. The ratings stayed linked, but beauty had no link to errors or to time. The authors concluded that attractive things are perceived to work better, which is a weaker claim than Norman's. With twelve people the study is small, so treat it as a hint and not a final answer.
052 min
Matching Emotional Design to the user's mood
If mood changes how people think, the right amount of decoration depends on the mood in which the product is used. Norman shows this with teapots he owns. One, copied from a design by the French artist Jacques Carelman, is made to be unusable: its handle sits on the same side as the spout. Another, by Michael Graves, looks clumsy but works well. A third, from the German firm Ronnefeldt, follows the stages of brewing. The pot lies on its back while the leaves steep, tilts as the tea darkens, and stands upright so the leaves leave the water.
On an ordinary morning Norman uses none of them. He heats water in a button-operated hot pot and brews in a small metal ball, because speed matters most then. He uses the others when he has time or guests. Which design is right, he says, depends on the occasion and on his mood.
That choice has a limit. Under stress, a pleasant surface cannot make up for a hard task. Norman's illustration is an escape from a hazard, and he offers it as an observation, not as a study result. Under stress, people who meet a door that will not open push again harder instead of trying to pull. Calm people would try the other direction. Anxiety narrows thinking, so a product for a stressful moment, such as an emergency exit, must make the correct action obvious and easy. Tools for serious, concentrated work are served best by designs that emphasize function and remove anything irrelevant.
Relaxed use is the opposite case. Norman's advice is that products for relaxed, pleasant occasions can improve how usable they are through pleasant design. The user in a good mood forgives small problems, and the product helps to put them in that mood.
062 min
Emotional Design in real products
Norman and Ortony checked the model against ordinary products. Four cases show each level at work, and one of them shows a level failing first.
OXO kettles and the behavioral level
A kettle that burns the hand makes its owner angry. Norman and Ortony call the designer's response emotion prevention: remove the cause of the anger before it appears. They follow two kettles from OXO. The first had a shield to keep steam off the arm. The shield did not fully work: the trigger that lifted the cap on the spout carried heat and burned a finger. The next model had a heat-resistant handle and a lid that opens when the kettle is tilted, so no finger goes near a hot part. The first model shows the behavioral level failing, and the second shows it done well.
Alessi and the visceral level
The Italian firm Alessi makes housewares that many people call cute, clever and pretty. Professional designers often dismiss them as mere styling. Norman and Ortony accept that the appeal is on the surface and say the critics are wrong about what matters: buyers enjoy that pleasure, so the attempt to create it works. The description of Norman's book on the Nielsen Norman Group site gives a larger example. It points to the jump in Macintosh sales when Apple introduced the colorful iMac.
Harley-Davidson and the move from visceral to reflective
The sound of a Harley-Davidson engine began as a by-product of how the engine was built. People found it attractive and distinctive enough that the company trademarked it and works to keep it in every model. Norman and Ortony read this as a visceral appeal that became a reflective sign of the brand.
The 2004 Corvette and the reflective level
When Chevrolet replaced the hide-away headlights of the 2004 Corvette, the designers judged the new lights both more attractive and more functional. They then worried that they had lost the car's distinctive image, which is a reflective concern. They were relieved to find that the image had survived.
072 min
Why designers cannot fully control Emotional Design
In every case, what the user felt differed from what the maker planned, and Norman and Ortony make that difference part of the theory. Emotions are in the user, not in the product. A designer can only offer chances for a feeling, which the two authors call emotional affordances. An affordance, in Norman's older sense, is what an object lets a person do, such as a handle that invites a grip. An emotional affordance is the same idea applied to feeling. A camera phone that makes it easy to take, share and send a photo also makes it easy to feel close to someone. Whether the person takes the chance is outside the designer's control, and some feelings are the opposite of the ones intended. Designers have more influence over the visceral and behavioral levels than over the reflective one, but even there the influence is indirect.
Emotion by accident and emotion by design
When a designer focuses on function, feelings arise by accident: the anger at a kettle that burns, the pleasure at an engine sound. A designer who only wants a product to work can still reduce anger, as OXO did. When a designer focuses on appearance, the feelings are planned, and the authors call that emotion promotion. They also note an asymmetry. A focus on function often causes unplanned feelings, while a focus on appearance rarely causes unplanned problems with function.
082 min
When Emotional Design goes wrong
The most common failure is to read the theory as permission to decorate. Norman expected this misreading. In his 2002 essay he imagined readers hearing that it is fine to be pretty and ignoring decades of usability work.
Beauty without use
Norman says that many designers and design schools cannot tell prettiness from usefulness. He says a beautiful product still has to do a useful job, work well and be understandable. A product that is beautiful and unusable is no better than one that is only pretty.
Feelings that are meant to be unpleasant
Emotion by design does not always aim at pleasure. A skull and crossbones on a poison label, and barbed wire on a fence, exist to create fear, because fear keeps people away. The same tools can be turned against the user inside a product, as with the manipulative interface tricks covered under dark patterns.
Claims about loyalty, sales and the future
Many pages on this topic say Emotional Design raises loyalty and retention. None of the research cited here measured either one. The studies measured ratings, errors and time, and the only sales example is the iMac. Treat the business claim as plausible but unproven, and measure it in your own product. Some writers also expect AI personalization and calmer, less stressful interfaces. Those are forecasts, not findings.
People feel differently
The visceral level is mostly shared across cultures because biology sets it. The behavioral level is learned, and the reflective level depends on culture, age, social group and fashion. For one person it can change from week to week with the role they play. A design built around one group's reflective values can mean something different, or nothing, to another.
092 min
Applying Emotional Design
These findings suggest an order of work.
- Name the user's mood. A tool used under stress or a deadline needs clear actions first. A tool used at leisure can carry more visual and tactile polish.
- Fix behavioral failures before adding looks. People feel anger when a product fails what they expected, and surface polish does not remove that anger.
- Add visceral qualities where the mood allows. The pages that rank for this topic list the same design choices: color, type, shape, imagery, motion, and small animated responses to an action.
- Choose the reflective message on purpose. Tone of voice in labels and error messages, a mascot, a brand story and personalization all tell users what using the product says about them. Keep the message the same at every touchpoint, as Chevrolet checked that the Corvette still looked like a Corvette.
- Spend extra effort where feelings are strongest: first use, errors, empty screens and success messages. Progress markers and rewards can add pleasure, but only when the task underneath works.
- Check inclusion and access. Test whether color meanings, humor and images work for the groups you serve, and keep contrast and motion controls accessible.
- Measure belief and behavior separately. Ask for ratings of beauty and ease of use before and after a task, and also record errors and time, as the 2005 London team did. A product can win on ratings and tie on performance, and both results are useful.
Trust comes mainly from a product doing what it says every time. A pleasant surface cannot supply it.
101 min
Emotional Design vs. nearby concepts
Three related ideas are easy to mix up with Emotional Design.
| Concept | What it claims | How it differs from Emotional Design |
|---|---|---|
| Not in the library yetAesthetic-usability effect | ||
| DesignBehavioral design | ||
| DesignUser experience design |
The shared word causes the most mistakes. Behavioral design aims to shape what people do. Norman's behavioral level has no such aim. It describes the skill and the expectations that are built into using a product, and the feelings that follow when use goes well or badly.
?3 questions
Questions people ask
When did Norman publish Emotional Design?
Does Emotional Design apply to services as well as objects?
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§6 sources
Sources
Norman, D. A. (2002). Emotion and design: Attractive things work better. Interactions 9(4), 36-42.
Norman, D. A. and Ortony, A. (2003). Designers and users: Two perspectives on emotion and design. Paper for the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea symposium.
Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A. and Nowicki, G. P. (1987). Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52(6), 1122-1131.
Tractinsky, N. (2013). Replicating and extending research on relations between visual aesthetics and usability. RepliCHI 2013, a summary of Kurosu and Kashimura (1995) and Tractinsky (1997).
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Chawda, B., Craft, B., Cairns, P., Ruger, S. and Heesch, D. (2005). Do "Attractive Things Work Better"? An exploration of search tool visualisations. HCI 2005.
Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books.
