In the book emotional design the author presented the idea of design based on how things look and the fact that if they looked better they would be more usable. This seemed to me to be a complete opposite idea of what the same author presented in the book Design of Everyday Things. In the the previous book I remember reading that the author thought that making things aesthetically pleasing was not the way to go when designing things for the user, but in this book Chapter one is all about designing things that way and the pros of it.
The main idea of this is that emotions are a big factor when people are thinking about ways to solve things. The author mentions studies where people were found to brainstorm/problem solve better when in a good mood rather than when they were in a bad mood. The purpose of mentioning that was because he hypothesized that people would be able to figure out something they were getting wrong easier if the thing they were working with made them happy. He also mentioned a study about ATMs where the buttons were arranged "attractively", the study found that people like the ones where the buttons were arranged in an attractive way rather than a normal way.
The main difference in the 2 book written by this author was the way he said to go about designing things and the way he said people should be able to figure things out. In Design of Everyday Things he said that things should come natural to people and that designers should think of that rather than what the device looked like. He even came up with examples that looked good but were terrible designs. In this one chapter of Emotional Design he stated that attractive things work well, which to me means that designers should focus on what the device looks like rather than the usability for the user.
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