Designing for Emotion:
A Review

I've loved all of the books in A Book Apart's series: Brief books for people who make websites. But Aarron Walter's Designing for Emotion stood out for one reason. It got me really excited about what web design can be.

It's a quick read with lots of ideas on how designers can use tactics that hit at the hearts of our audiences. The ideas aren’t just for websites either.

Walter shares ideas that can be applied to a business's or organization's entire system of customer interaction. Walter creates a conversation about an entire new level of engaging experiences – that websites and applications can do more than simply help a person get from point A to point B.

Designing for Emotion takes the reader through a short history of emotional design, the psychology of how and why it works and gives real examples of how emotional design has been used to create successful relationships between businesses and their customers.

Of course, Walter has plenty of first-hand experience with successful emotional design. As the lead user experience designer for MailChimp, Walter has helped the company implement memorable user experiences on the site and in their web-based email campaign application.

A notable example of creating an emotional connection with users is the humorous and friendly greetings that Freddie Von Chimpenheimer, MailChimp’s lovable mascot, gives its users as they're creating and sending emails. The result, Walter says, "was that the random jokes actually helped users complete long, more complicated task flows."

For anyone who thinks websites should do more for the people who use them, Walter's thoughts in Designing for Emotion, are absolute gold.

I'd even wager that his ideas are applicable on a much larger scale; if you're making things (anything) that people use, Designing for Emotion is a must read.