Emotional Design — How to Make Products People Will Love
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’ll Learn
The relationship between emotion and design, and how to tap into it for more effective designs.
How human factors affect the emotional responses to a design, with real-life examples.
How to design for positive emotional experiences.
What the “Triune Brain” is, and how to apply it to your work.
The difference between visceral, behavioral and reflective design, and how to encourage positive visceral, behavioral and reflective processing.
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Is This Course Right for You?
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
You’ll join a global community and work together to improve your skills and career opportunities. Connect with helpful peers and make friends with like-minded individuals as you push deeper into the exciting and booming industry of design.
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: 22 hours 53 mins spread over 9 weeks .
Lesson 0: Welcome and Introduction
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0.1: Welcome! (14 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: How to Earn Your Course Certificate (16 mins)
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0.5: Meet your peers online in our discussion forums (5 mins)
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0.6: Meet and learn from design professionals at an upcoming meet-up (1 min)
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0.7: Gain Timeless Skills Through Courses From the Interaction Design Foundation (21 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
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1.1: Welcome and Introduction (6 mins)
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1.2: Emotion (19 mins)
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1.3: Emotion and Design (44 mins)
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1.4: Negative Emotional Responses (19 mins)
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1.5: Share Your Example of Poor Emotional Design (6 mins)
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1.6: Positive Emotional Responses (22 mins)
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1.7: Please Share Your Experiences of Positive Emotional Design (6 mins)
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1.8: Using Affordances to Avoid Negative Emotional Responses (18 mins)
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1.9: Emotion and Experience - Introduction (21 mins)
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1.10: Community-based learning and networking (6 mins)
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1.11: Congratulations and Recap (7 mins)
Lesson 2: How Products Affect Us: Emotional Responses, Connections and Associations
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2.1: Welcome and Introduction (6 mins)
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2.2: The Product-Emotion Cycle and Relationship Between People and Things (23 mins)
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2.3: Positive Emotional Responses (50 mins)
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2.4: Creating Emotional Connections (17 mins)
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2.5: Designing for Emotion (11 mins)
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2.6: Emotions in Systems (23 mins)
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2.7: Emotion and Experience - Application Areas 1 (28 mins)
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2.8: Emotional Product Design (6 mins)
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2.9: Please Share Your Meaningful Connections (6 mins)
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2.10: General Lesson Discussion (6 mins)
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2.11: Congratulations and Recap (7 mins)
Lesson 3: Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective Design - Don Norman's Three Levels of Design
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3.1: Welcome and Introduction (6 mins)
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3.2: Norman's Three Levels of Design (42 mins)
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3.3: The Visceral Level of Emotional Design (49 mins)
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3.4: The Behavioral Level of Emotional Design (28 mins)
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3.5: The Reflective Level of Emotional Design (25 mins)
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3.6: Applying Norman's Model of Emotion: Colors in Logo Design (6 mins)
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3.7: Identifying Examples of Norman's Three Types of Design (6 mins)
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3.8: General Lesson Discussion (6 mins)
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3.9: Congratulations and Recap (7 mins)
Lesson 4: Affect and Design: Designing Positive Emotional Experiences
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4.1: Welcome and Introduction (6 mins)
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4.2: How Emotions Impact Cognition (25 mins)
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4.3: Affect and Design (47 mins)
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4.4: Emotion and Design: Affect and Design (14 mins)
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4.5: Affect: Emotion and Design (7 mins)
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4.6: Emotion and Design: Influence the Consumer's Decision-Making (6 mins)
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4.7: Emotion and Experience - Application Areas 2 (29 mins)
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4.8: Stimulating the Affective System (6 mins)
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4.9: General Lesson Discussion (6 mins)
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4.10: Congratulations and Recap (7 mins)
Lesson 5: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Helping Users "Self-Actualize"
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5.1: Welcome and Introduction (6 mins)
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5.2: Why UX Now? (33 mins)
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5.3: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (46 mins)
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5.4: Physiological Needs: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (19 mins)
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5.5: Safety: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (17 mins)
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5.6: Esteem: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (19 mins)
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5.7: Self-Actualization: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (20 mins)
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5.8: Emotion and Experience - Application Areas 3 (10 mins)
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5.9: Self-Actualization: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (8 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"? (7 mins)
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5.12: Congratulations and Recap (7 mins)
Lesson 6: The Triune Brain: Sorry, You Have to Please Three Brains, Not Just One
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6.1: Welcome and Introduction (7 mins)
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6.2: The Concept of the "Triune Brain" (12 mins)
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6.3: Our Three Brains - The Reptilian Brain (18 mins)
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6.4: Our Three Brains - The Emotional Brain (17 mins)
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6.5: Our Three Brains - The Rational Brain (16 mins)
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6.6: Identify Your Skills (37 mins)
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6.7: Emotion Theory - Kinds of Emotion, Reason and Emotion (48 mins)
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6.8: Emotion Theory - The Happy Mean, Experience and Enchantment (37 mins)
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6.9: Exercise: Does Theory Help? (9 mins)
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6.10: General Lesson Discussion (7 mins)
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6.11: Congratulations and Recap (7 mins)
Lesson 7: Emotional Design: Applying the Knowledge
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7.1: Welcome and Introduction (6 mins)
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7.2: The Reptilian Brain: Emotion and Design (22 mins)
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7.3: The Paleomammalian Brain: Emotion and Design (20 mins)
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7.4: The Neomammalian Brain: Emotion and Design (52 mins)
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7.5: Some Useful links, Resources, References and Images for Those Researching Emotion and Design (7 mins)
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7.6: Designing Experience - Crackers Case Study (1 hour 18 mins)
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7.7: Designing Experience - Exercise (9 mins)
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7.8: General Lesson Discussion (6 mins)
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7.9: Congratulations and Recap (3 mins)
Lesson 8: Course Certificate, Final Networking, and Course Wrap-up
Learning Paths
This course is part of 4 learning paths:
How Others Have Benefited
Maryna Revutska, Ukraine
“Good length of each lesson, and open end questions helped me to remember the information really well. I love the videos with Alan Dix — he explains everything nicely!”
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 designing the interactions. The experience of a product starts way before a customer uses it, and continues on for much longer after it has been put down. Cool!”
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