Emotional Engagement talks

Emotional engagement is about how a product makes people feel, and how those feelings shape what they do. Beyond being usable, an experience can be reassuring, delightful, frustrating or forgettable, and people tend to remember the emotional peaks more than the details.

For designers, emotion is a practical concern. Feelings affect whether people trust a product, how they judge its quality and whether they come back. Empathy with users helps teams understand those feelings, and patterns from psychology help explain them. The same insight can be used to persuade, so it calls for care.

The 14 talks here span 2009 to 2018. Don Norman explains three ways good design makes you happy (TED, 2009), and Aaron Walter covers designing emotional experiences. Stephen Anderson’s “Hooked on a Feeling” was recorded at IxDA Events in 2015, and Nathalie Nahai presents five psychological principles of persuasive product design (Mind the Product, 2015). Empathy is the focus for Jon Kolko and Aaron Gustafson, Kelly Goto maps emotion to experience (UX Lisbon, 2014) and Jacob Greenshpan looks at designing for love (UX Salon, 2014). Dan Saffer covers microinteractions, Benjamin De Cock talks about motion and playfulness, and Jared Spool, Julie Zhuo and David Carson also contribute.