Pleasurability, User Experience and Emotional Design

Today, I am blogging this web seminar presentation from Frank Spillers, a usability design expert and user experience consultant who runs Experience Dynamics. The slidecast is a very interesting primer about emotional design and what he calls pleasurability of a product. For us as player researchers and game designers, this topic is especially interesting, because games tend to be product that leverage this positive emotional power. His claim that when you design any kind of product, you should think about the experience (essentially created in the interaction with humans) it creates. A major takeaway here is also that problem-solving can be enjoyable if done in the right emotional context. On the other hand, his claims that PrEmo and LEMtool “are the only proven and practical tools for measuring product emotion” should be taken with a grain of salt (there are others out there, e.g., SAM). Nevertheless, it is a very interesting and nice presentation as a primer of emotion design and I highly recommend it for today’s dark afternoon.