This book is an example of when brevity strikes back. This book, while brief and an enjoyable is lacking in substance. Emotional design or the topic of emotion and design is often tackled from a subjective perspective by known experts. These perspectives while interesting and often fresh are often lacking of the foundations to explain just why emotions matter so much, leaving the authors preaching to the choir and lacking the empirical perspective.I was hoping this book would cover the science of emotions and their implications for design. Instead the author primarily focused on the practical approach for designing for emotion, borrowing from mail chimps and other sites of similar scale. The challenge in this, is the author is very comfortable making design tradeoffs that bias towards the whimsical in spite of some of their costs in terms of page load times etc. This approach is often quite useful and beneficial to smaller companies that are not marketplace leaders, but to use an obvious example like the "don't pull this handle button) would never be used by a category leader, in spite of the rich emotional connections some category leaders such as Apple have developed in the process.The good news is there are other books such as: Design for Emotion and Emotional Design to name a few that go into more depth.There are redeemable traits of this book as well. For example the brevity leads to a quick read and the section on designing your brand personality is quite interesting approach for making a brand personality a bit more concrete. A serious look into emotional engagement in web design. It was a very mystifying title for me. At first, I had mused on its meaning, only to be corrected by its facts.Emotional engagement is a powerful mechanic to aid us as designers. Designing For Emotion lays the groundwork for beginning to use that aid effectively. Without doing some more research I can't say what it might be missing. What I can say is that it's a thought provoking journey into the ever expanding niches of web design.I look forward to implementing some of not all of the suggestions somewhere along the line. Also, I think it bears saying that this book should be read more than once. Like all the A Book Apart volumes it's a powerful primer for the prescribed subject. As we all know, no one does material on web practices like they do.
What do You think about Desiging For Emotion (2011)?
Disappointing. Trite, shallow and with little rigour to it.
—janessaluvy
