Why Does 'Emotional Design' Work on the Web: for Felony & Mayhem, It's No Mystery

Why are some company's websites more memorable than others? On the surface, it might seem to have to do with originality, visual impact and branding. But what if I were to tell you that the most important factor is how a site makes a visitor feel?

That's the premise of a new book by Aaron Walter, the lead user-experience designer for Mail Chimp. Based on the title, Designing for Emotion could have been just another collection of pretty design samples embroidered with squishy commentary. Nothing could be further from the truth. Walter's approach is direct, rigorous, at times scientific and filled with practical insight and humor. The book is part of the truly excellent A Book Apart series, and Mail Chimp, if you haven't had a chance to use it, is easily the most pleasurable of the gazillion SAS email marketing platforms out there. So despite the title I found my finger ineluctably moving to the checkout button.

I was not disappointed. Aaron Walter has laid out in a scant 100 pages the outlines of how "emotional design" works on the web and how designers can use it to make a deeper connection with their audience. His first and most important point is that websites should feel like they are made by human beings for human beings. Everything else follows from that. Along the way he quotes Donald Norman, a pioneering product designer who literally wrote the book on Emotional Design, about why attractive things actually work better:

Attractive things make people feel good, which in turn makes them think more creatively. How does that make something easier to use? Simple, by making it easier for people to find solutions to the problems they encounter.

Steve Jobs took this up a notch with the design of Apple products: research shows people respond to their iPhones as if the phones were loved ones (the anticipation, the quickening of the pulse, the abject disappointment!) The attractiveness of a product certainly affects how we feel about it—and Norman would argue, how we use it—but when it comes to websites it is the personality that is expressed through the design that makes it memorable. Once you have met the Mail Chimp, Freddie Von Chimpenheimer IV, you will never forget him.

It just happened that as I was reading the book, I was putting the finishing touches on the redesign of the website for Felony & Mayhem Press, an independent publisher of mystery fiction. It had been a long process getting the look and feel right and making the company’s backlist mesh in an intuitive way with the e-commerce functions. But as I read on, I kept having AhHa! moments where I realized that an essential part of the process had been about making a website that would establish a human connection with its audience.

Readers have very strong opinions about their mysteries, and Felony's distinction is that they have a highly curated list of previously unavailable or out-of-print masterpieces in their respective genres. The site itself had to communicate the level of care and detail that goes into selecting and producing the books. It also had to be fun—this is entertainment, after all.

Here is where emotional design and content strategy meet. Part of the "design" of the Felony site is that it has to contain a lot of great writing about authors and books. One of the pleasures of great mysteries is that the plot functions as an armature on which the author hangs descriptions of fascinating places and intriguing characters, all of it written in a distinctive style. We figured Felony's readers would expect the same of the company’s website, and after much trial and error settled on having the publisher's current blog post positioned above the fold on the home page, along with a charming caricature of her by Ed Fotheringham. This is a clear signal to the reader that there's a person behind the brand, that the brand values engaging writing and that creating a conversation about books with them is more important that just selling them books.

Audience reaction has been universally positive, including the highest praise that the site "looks and reads great."  But all the "emotional design" in the world won't help if a site doesn't work well. In this case, satisfying the needs and desires of viewers means making it easy for them to find books by author, title, series, etc., and to buy them. Once you have those things right, though, it is the personality of the site that will keep people coming back. As Walter says in the chapter on personality: "Let us think of our designs not as a facade for interaction, but as people with whom our audience can have an inspired conversation." Those conversations form uniquely personal experiences, which in the transitory world of the web are the most memorable and valuable of all marketing assets.