Good Design Makes Us Happy

In a TED conference, Don Norman brought in the concept of the "New Me" and shared the 3 ways that good design can make us happy. He said as technology becomes pervasive and the boundaries to access information are diminishing, the ease of replicating a product's functionality has caused the product to loose its attractiveness. To complement for its setback, he feels the need for the product to look aesthetically appealing and must emote a person's emotion of happiness and creativity.

To emote happiness and creativity, one must remove fear. And that feeling of fear can be countered with good design which is capable of interacting with the person at 3 levels - visceral, behavioral and reflective.

Visceral design communicates through a person's vision. It is about manipulating a person's perceptive of the object through colours and styles.

Behavioral design makes a person feel in control. This principle follows closely to the human subconsciously responds where when designing an object, the human norm reactions are taken into consideration.

Reflective design triggers the little "voice" in us that meddles with our judgement that eventually determines our decision.

Norman has conducted many interesting research on designs and emotions. Do visit his site at http://www.jnd.org/about.html to find out more.

With the understanding that an individual can emote different feelings based on aesthetic design, there is a need for us to balance out the elements to be induced in the product or service. Hence, the principle of simplicity or intuitive must be questioned at each designing phase. This is crucial as we often want to provide the best, but to be the best often leads to having more elements in a small frame of an object. Therefore, techniques such as Heuristics Usability evaluation is introduced.

Basing on Heuristic Usability Evaluation alone does not suffice in providing real life responses and experiences of the product of service. The need for usability testing is required to obtain firsthand feedback. In order to perform the test, tracking technologies are put in place to capture a subject's behavior which will be used for further evaluation later.