Emotional about design

This is not a new article. Many of you might have already seen it. I think it's good to archive it.

Originally published on Thursday March 11, 2004 at The Guardian

Former Apple fellow and design guru Don Norman has been influential on and offline. He tells Jack Schofield why products should now start making us smile

Don Norman changed the way a generation of designers saw the world, and this had an impact on many of the things you have in your home. Thanks to Norman, at least a few of them - including Apple's Macintosh - became more usable. Now he's hoping to repeat his success, but with a difference. Before, he was a sort of Nasty Norman, the academic who told you why your product was bad. Now he's become Nice Norman, who smiles and tells you how great everything is.

"That was the old Don Norman," he says. "This is my new life. I'm trying really hard to be positive about things."

It's quite a turnaround, but like the rest of his work, it's based on everyday experience. His ground-breaking book, The Psychology of Everyday Things, published in 1988, was a paean to usability, but it did not stop him from buying and liking products that didn't meet his own strictures.

"Our house is littered with things that don't work too well," he confesses, "but I wanted them anyway."

The sequel, Emotional Design, is based on the idea that there are three levels at play in design: visceral, behavioural, and reflective. It's still true that, on a rational level, products should be functional, but now he explains why they should be beautiful and have an emotional impact as well.

"I want products that are a joy to behold and a pleasure to use," he says. "We now know how to make products that work fine; how do we make products that make you smile?"

The fun side made numerous appearances during my long talk with Norman on one of his rare visits to the UK from his base in Silicon Valley, California. To illustrate a point, he'd take out a watch or a pen, hand it over, and wait for a smile, or even a wow. Time by Design's Pie watch, for example, has no hands, so before you can tell the time, you have to figure out how it works. Norman readily admits that it's harder to read than a conventional, user-centred design, but for him, "the reflective value [of the Pie watch] outweighs the behavioural difficulties". He loves it.

"Visceral design is what nature does," says Norman, and he reckons it's "biologically prewired". Visceral design is about how things look, feel and sound - the world of blue skies and apple pie. One of Norman's examples of visceral design is the 1961 E-type Jaguar: it's the kind of car people fall in love with and want to own. How well it works, and how much it costs, are afterthoughts. Some people will buy a bottle of Perrier water for the visceral design of the bottle, even if it costs more than similar water in a crude but functional plastic bottle. Putting iMacs in colourful plastic cases is another example of visceral design.

"Behavioural design is all about use," says Norman. "Appearance really doesn't matter: performance does." This is the area where The Design of Everyday Things was a huge success. Behavioural design is about getting products to function well, and about making that functionality easily accessible - an area where technology products often fall down. Some things are complicated, so users may still have to learn how something works. However, they should only have to learn it once, he says.

"Reflective design is about the meaning of things," says Norman. "It's about message: what does using this product say about you? It's where your self-image is. It depends on your age, background, culture." The reflective level is where things like brand image and marketing come into play, selling products not on their functionality but on things like prestige and exclusivity. Reflective design about creating things you want to show off to your friends. An example, on the cover of Emotional Design, is Philippe Starck's Juicy Salif, about which the designer reportedly said: "My juicer is not meant to squeeze lemons, it is meant to start conversations." Norman says he has one, "but I don't use it for squeezing lemons".

Visceral appeal is fast, sometimes instant, and most products have it to some degree. (Things that don't obviously have it are known as "acquired tastes".) Behavioural design is useful, if not essential: there is a market for clocks that make it really hard to tell the time but, outside design museum shops, it is not a large one. Reflective design is often a part of people's long-term relationship with a product - do they love it or hate it? - and can be enhanced by brand marketing and cultural conditioning.

"Branding is pure reflection," says Norman. To reduce things to basics, the visceral is what something looks like, the behavioural is how it works, and the reflective is what it means to you. And every product works on all three levels, whether the designer has thought about it or not. In Emotional Design, Norman quotes Del Coates's book, Watches Tell More Than Time, where he explains that "it is impossible to design a watch that tells only time. Knowing nothing more, the design of a watch alone - or of any other product - can suggest assumptions about the age, gender, and outlook of the person who wears it".

In other words, there is no escape. Wearing a cheap, functional watch sends a different message from wearing an expensive, but fashionable, model, regardless of how well it tells the time. In the same way, Norman's "smart casual" open-necked shirt and pullover send the message that he's a designer rather than an accountant, while the fact that he's still immaculately turned out shows that it's not accidental. They're the kind of assessments we all make, but Norman brings them to the surface. (He likes the folk tale about fish being the last to notice water.)

Norman points out that reflective design becomes more important as products mature. In the early days, it may be a struggle to get something to work well - the first cars, and the first computers, were examples. But when you can take functionality for granted, how do you choose between different products? You choose the ones with emotional appeal, the ones you can fall in love with, the ones that say more about you than cash ever can. "Reflective design is where companies live or die," says Norman.

Reflective design reflects the real world. "Look around at the wide variety of things you can buy - chairs, for example. Different people have different homes and different tastes and different chairs for different uses," says Norman. "That's a good thing: it makes life richer." Negative Norman might have criticised their usability drawbacks, but Mr Positive is more concerned with appreciating what each one offers.

Norman hopes the new approach will lead to something of a career shift. For the past 20 years, he has been closely associated with personal computing and the web, having been a "User Experience Architect" and fellow at Apple Computer in California, and co-founder with Jakob Nielsen of the web usability company, Nielsen Norman Group. (He's also professor of computer science, psychology and cognitive science at Northwestern University in Chicago.) "I'm trying to move the Nielsen Norman group towards product design," he says, "and I also want to expand the focus on usability to include things that are enjoyable." The new book is taking him in that direction.

Norman thinks the things that now need attention are not so much computers but "the interior of the automobile, the cell phone, and home theatre. They're all becoming complicated and unusable." He's also exploring the coming age of robotics and, to some people's discomfort, the latest book ends with a long exploration of emotional machines and robots, including teaching machines.

But, sad to say - and I had to ask - "no, there's nothing about doorknobs" in Emotional Design. As people who have read it will know, The Design of Everyday Things changed the way many of us saw door knobs and handles, and how you decided which side of the door to push or pull. That was just one of the ways the book encouraged people to think about design, but it was the most memorable one. "I'm a scientist and it took me a while to get over being famous for bad door handles," says Norman. "I now think it's nice that it changed so many people's lives. I don't know whether Emotional Design will have the same impact. All I can say is, 'I hope so'."

· Emotional Design is published by Basic Books