Emotional Design — How to Make Products People Will Love v1
How This Course Will Help Your Career
What separates great products from good ones? Attractive designs? User testing? Genius designers? Well, these might be contributory factors, but the true distinction lies in how they make users feel. Every experience has an emotional component, and using products is no different. Incorporating emotion should therefore be a key consideration when designing products or websites. This course will provide you with an understanding of emotional responses and how to create designs that encourage them.
An understanding of emotional design—how users feel and what affects these feelings—is essential if you want to provide great user experiences. There are probably things near you right now that are not necessarily the best, and they might not even be particularly attractive, but you are nonetheless still using them. Take a seashell from your favorite beach, or your very first tennis racket, for example; they are meaningful to you, and you consequently feel a connection to them. These connections are powerful; they subconsciously affect you and have the capacity to turn inanimate objects into evocative extensions of you as an individual.
In this course, we will provide you with the information necessary to elicit such positive emotional experiences through your designs. Human-computer interaction (HCI) specialist Alan Dix provides video content for each of the lessons, helping to crystallize the information covered throughout the course. By the end of it, you will have a better understanding of the relationship between people and the things they use in their everyday lives and, more importantly, how to design new products and websites which elicit certain emotional responses.
What you will learn
- How to establish a relationship between emotion and design
- Examples of emotional responses in design and the human factors that affect them
- Designing for positive emotional experiences
- Examples of emotional responses in design
- The difference between visceral, behavioral and reflective design, and how to encourage positive visceral, behavioral and reflective processing
- The concept and application of the “Triune Brain”
Who should take this course
This is an intermediate-level course recommended for anyone involved in the design process of a product or website:
- UX, UI, and web designers keen on designing products that elicit the right emotional response from users, and thus keep them engaged
- Project managers interested in making their products cater to the users’ emotions
- Software engineers looking to understand how to target users’ emotional responses more effectively
- Entrepreneurs who want to ship products that users are engaged with and respond positively towards
- Marketers interested in creating the right emotional response in customers across all touch-points
- Newcomers to design who are considering making a switch to UX, UI, or web design
Courses in the Interaction Design Foundation are designed to contain comprehensive, evidence-based content, while ensuring that the learning curve is never too steep. All participants will have the opportunity to share ideas, seek help with tests, and enjoy the social aspects afforded by our open and friendly forum.
Learn and work with a global team of designers
When you take part in this course, you will join a global multidisciplinary team working on the course and the exercises at the same time as you. You will work together to improve your skills and understanding. Your course group will be made up of an incredibly diverse group of professionals, all of whom have the same objective—to become successful designers. It’s your chance to learn, grow, and network with your peers across the planet.
Gain an Industry-Recognized UX Course Certificate
Use your industry-recognized Course Certificate on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or your website.
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Lessons in This Course
- Each week, one lesson becomes available.
- There's no time limit to finish a course. Lessons have no deadlines.
- Estimated learning time: 32 hours 17 mins spread over 8 weeks .
Lesson 0: Welcome and Introduction
To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 40 mins.
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0.1: Welcome! (9 mins)
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0.2: An introduction to courses from the Interaction Design Foundation (37 mins)
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0.3: Let our community help you (1 min)
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0.4: Meet your peers online in our discussion forums (6 mins)
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0.5: Meet and learn from design professionals at an upcoming meet-up (1 min)
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0.6: Gain Timeless Skills Through Courses From the Interaction Design Foundation (21 mins)
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0.7: How to Earn Your Course Certificate (16 mins)
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0.8: Mandatory vs. Optional Lesson Items (7 mins)
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0.9: A Mix Between Video-Based and Text-Based Lesson Content (6 mins)
Lesson 1: What do we mean by 'Emotion'? An Introduction to Emotional Design
To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 3 hours 33 mins.
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1.1: Emotion (44 mins)
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1.2: Emotion and Design (40 mins)
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1.3: Negative Emotional Responses (41 mins)
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1.4: Share your examples of poor emotional design (6 mins)
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1.5: Positive Emotional Responses (13 mins)
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1.6: Please share your experiences of negative emotional design (6 mins)
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1.7: Get your users feeling (32 mins)
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1.8: Avoid Negative Emotional Responses (6 mins)
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1.9: Emotional Products: Avoid Negative Emotional Responses (7 mins)
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1.10: Emotion and Experience - Introduction (17 mins)
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1.11: Community-based learning and networking (6 mins)
Lesson 2: How products affect us: Emotional Responses, Connections and Associations
To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 3 hours 51 mins.
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2.1: The Relationship between Man and Things (1 hour 13 mins)
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2.2: Positive Emotional Responses (45 mins)
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2.3: Creating Emotional Connections (43 mins)
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2.4: Designing for Emotion (6 mins)
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2.5: Emotions in Systems (23 mins)
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2.6: Emotion and Experience - Application Areas 1 (28 mins)
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2.7: Emotional Product Design (6 mins)
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2.8: Please share your meaningful connections (6 mins)
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2.9: General Lesson Discussion (6 mins)
Lesson 3: Visceral, Behavioural and Reflective Design - Don Norman's Three Levels of Design
To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 4 hours 35 mins.
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3.1: Norman's Three Levels of Design (1 hour 8 mins)
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3.2: Three Levels of Emotional Design (44 mins)
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3.3: Three Levels of Design (1 hour 16 mins)
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3.4: Reflective Design: Norman's Three Levels of Design (1 hour 13 mins)
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3.5: Colour in Logo Design (6 mins)
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3.6: Identifying examples of Norman's Three Types of Design (6 mins)
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3.7: General Lesson Discussion (6 mins)
Lesson 4: Affect and Design: Designing positive emotional experiences
To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 2 hours 58 mins.
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4.1: Cognition and Affect (45 mins)
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4.2: Affect and Design (42 mins)
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4.3: Emotion and Design: Affect and Design (40 mins)
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4.4: Affect: Emotion and Design (6 mins)
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4.5: Emotion and Design: Influence the Consumer's Decision-Making (6 mins)
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4.6: Emotion and Experience - Application Areas 2 (29 mins)
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4.7: Stimulating the Affective System (6 mins)
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4.8: General Lesson Discussion (6 mins)
Lesson 5: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Helping users 'self-actualise'
To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 6 hours 36 mins.
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5.1: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (42 mins)
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5.2: Physiological Needs: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (41 mins)
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5.3: Safety: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (1 hour 10 mins)
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5.4: Love/Belonging: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (41 mins)
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5.5: Esteem: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (44 mins)
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5.6: Self-Actualisation: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (1 hour 12 mins)
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5.7: Why UX Now? (33 mins)
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5.8: Emotion and Experience - Application Areas 3 (35 mins)
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5.9: Self-Actualisation: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (6 mins)
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5.10: The Personal Meaning of Things (10 mins)
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5.11: What's your take on the 'Hierarchy of Needs'? (6 mins)
Lesson 6: The Triune Brain: Sorry, you have to please three not just one brain
To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 4 hours 35 mins.
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6.1: The Concept of the 'Triune Brain' (42 mins)
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6.2: Our Three Brains (44 mins)
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6.3: The Emotional Brain (39 mins)
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6.4: The Rational Brain (38 mins)
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6.5: Identify your skills (5 mins)
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6.6: Emotion Theory - kinds of emotion, reason and emotion (40 mins)
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6.7: Emotion Theory - the happy mean, experience and enchantment (29 mins)
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6.8: Exercise: Does theory help? (34 mins)
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6.9: General Lesson Discussion (7 mins)
Lesson 7: Emotional Design: Applying the Knowledge
To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 4 hours 30 mins.
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7.1: Applying the Triune Brain Model in Design (37 mins)
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7.2: The Paleomammalian Brain: Emotion and Design (36 mins)
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7.3: The Neomammalian Brain: Emotion and Design (1 hour 9 mins)
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7.4: Some Useful links, resources, references and Images for those researching emotion and design (7 mins)
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7.5: Designing Experience - Crackers case study (1 hour 24 mins)
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7.6: Designing Experience - Exercise (34 mins)
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7.7: General Lesson Discussion (6 mins)
Lesson 8: Course Certificate, Final Networking, and Course Wrap-up
To be scheduled.
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8.1: Course Evaluation (1 min)
How Others Have Benefited
Herve David, Switzerland
“Hi thanks a lot for this great lesson I learnt a lot, I loved the concept of triune brain and his impact on the decision making process.”
Marlene P. Naicker, Netherlands
“The lessons are very thought provoking. Simple but complex - when you break them down.”
Emma Lundgren, Australia
“I really liked this lesson. It makes it more obvious that we as designers have a far wider responsibility than just just designing the interactions. The experience of a product start way before a customer uses it, and continues on for much longer after it has been put down. Cool!”
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