Design for Emotion

Chapter 3

When Do We Design for Emotion?

In Chapter 1, we explored several reasons why emotion should be a consideration in your design process. Throughout Chapter 2, we examined different models of emotion to better understand how the decisions we make as designers affect the different dimensions of users’ emotional responses. As you’ll see in Chapter 3, emotional states guide decision making and behavior by affecting how we focus attention, altering our intentions and increasing or decreasing our levels of motivation.

When we say “design for emotion,” what we’re really attempting to design for is an emotional response that increases the likelihood the user will perform a desired behavior. “Behavior is the real medium of interaction design” ...