Designing for emotional response
Design can elicit many different emotions. Many designers aim for surprise and delight, but those are not the only emotions you might want to elicit. If you are designing a site or an app for a charity or a campaign group, you might want to elicit compassion and a willingness to act - whether that is volunteering or donating. You might even want to elicit anger. Ages ago, the BBC published a series on user experience, and one of the things they talked about was BERTs - Bipolar Emotional Response Tests - which had a chart with a series of contrasted emotions (happy versus sad, angry versus calm, and so on) where testers were asked to respond to a design by marking on the chart how it made them feel. Their responses were then averaged out to provide an emotional profile of the website. A wheel of emotions This interview with Sherine Kazam offers a wheel of emotions and how they relate to each other (identified by Robert Plutchik in 1980). It's a more nuanced model, though I am not...