Book Reading #30: Emotional Design

Chapter 3: Three Levels of Design: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective

Author: Donald Norman

Summary

This chapter seems to be a continuation of the second chapter. He talks about the same three levels of emotional designs that he talked in last chapter - Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective. However in this chapter, he goes into much detail.

• Visceral level is about the first impression or the initial impact of the product. The factors contributing to visceral design are - look, feel, appearance and attractiveness.
• The behavioral level is about functionality and the experience of the user in using the product. If the systems solves a problem or meets a need and is fairly easy to use, then the product does well at the behavioral level.
• The reflective level is the highest level of emotional design. It's about the memories that the user forms about the experiences of using the product.

Norman also talks about two designing approaches - design by the individual and design by committee.

Discussion

Initially the chapter seemed a little repetitive since he already provides the definitions in the second chapter. However, in this chapter, the author makes the distinctions in the three levels very clear to the reader by giving more detailed description and plenty of everyday examples. Overall, I enjoyed reading the chapter, especially, the examples.