Books 2008 #7 Emotional Design

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things Another fine book from one half of the Nielsen Norman Group, this dimension’s usability overlords. As with The Design of Everyday Things, Norman presents complicated, thought provoking, research based findings in an easily digestible, pleasant manner. There’s a lot to be learned from Norman and with his easy writing style he makes it all so accessible. Bravo stuff.

My one complaint is that Norman goes off for about sixty pages about robots. I love robots as much as the next guy (who grew up on Star Wars, sci-fi novels and a Scientific American subscription) and even I got a little tired of reading about robots after a while. My girlfriend, who’s ahead of me on our design/user experience reading list says she put The Design of Future Things down because it was all robots, all the time. I’m probably going so sneak it down to the bottom of the pile, at the very minimum.