Emotional Design (13 page)

Swatch is famous for transforming the watch into a fashion statement, arguing that people should own as many watches as ties, or shoes, or even shirts. You should change your watch, they proclaimed, to match mood, activity, or even the time of day. The executive team of Swatch patiently tried to explain this to us: Yes, the watch mechanism had to be inexpensive, yet of high quality and reliable (and we were very impressed by our tour of their completely automated manufacturing facilities), but the real opportunities lay in exploiting the face and body of the watch. Their web site puts it like this:

At the time of my visit, we were impressed, but puzzled. We were technologists. The concept that a piece of advanced technology should really be thought of as a vehicle for emotions rather than for function was a bit difficult for us engineers to fathom. Our group could never get its act together enough to work in such a creative way, so nothing ever came of that venture—except for the long-lasting impression it
made on me. I learned that products can be more than the sum of the functions they perform. Their real value can be in fulfilling people's emotional needs, and one of the most important needs of all is to establish one's self-image and one's place in the world. In his important book about the role of industrial design,
Watches Tell More than Time,
the designer Del Coates explains that “it is impossible, in fact, to design a watch that tells
only
time. Knowing nothing more, the design of a watch alone—or of any product—can suggest assumptions about the age, gender, and outlook of the person who wears it.”

Did you ever consider buying an expensive, hand-crafted watch? Expensive jewelry? Single malt scotch or a prestige vodka? Can you really distinguish among the brands? Blind-tasting of many whiskeys, where the taster has no idea which glass contains which drink, reveals that you probably can't taste the difference. Why is an expensive original painting superior to a high-quality reproduction? Which would you prefer to have? If the painting is about aesthetics, then a good reproduction should suffice. But, obviously, paintings are more than aesthetics: they are about the reflective value of owning—or viewing—the original.

These questions are all cultural. There is nothing practical, nothing biological, about the answers. The answers are conventions, learned in whatever society you inhabit. For some of you, the answers will be obvious; for others, the questions will not even make sense. That is the essence of reflective design: it is all in the mind of the beholder.

Attractiveness is a visceral-level phenomenon—the response is entirely to the surface look of an object. Beauty comes from the reflective level. Beauty looks below the surface. Beauty comes from conscious reflection and experience. It is influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture. Objects that are unattractive on the surface can give pleasure. Discordant music, for example, can be beautiful. Ugly art can be beautiful.

Advertising can work at either the visceral or the reflective level. Pretty products—sexy automobiles, powerful-looking trucks, seductive bottles for drinks and perfume—play with the visceral level.
Prestige, perceived rarity, and exclusiveness work at the reflective level. Raise the price of Scotch, and increase the sales. Make it difficult to get reservations to a restaurant or entrance to a club, and increase their desirability. These are reflective-level ploys.

Reflective-level operations often determine a person's overall impression of a product. Here, you think back about the product, reflecting upon its total appeal and the experience of using it. Here is where many factors come into play and where the deficiencies of one aspect can be outweighed by the strengths of another. Minor difficulties might very well be overlooked in the overall assessment—or enhanced, blown all out of proportion.

The overall impact of a product comes through reflection—in retrospective memory and reassessment. Do you fondly show your possessions to friends and colleagues, or do you hide them and, if you talk at all, is it only to complain? Things that an owner is proud of will be displayed prominently, or, at the least, shown to people.

Customer relationships play a major role at the reflective level, so much so that a good relationship can completely reverse an otherwise negative experience with the product. Thus, a company that goes out of its way to assist and help disgruntled customers can often turn them into its most loyal fans. Indeed, the person who buys a product and has nothing but pleasant experiences with it may be less satisfied than the one who has an unhappy experience, but is well treated by the company as it fixes the problem. This is an expensive way to win customer loyalty, but it shows the power of the reflective level. Reflective design is really about long-term customer experience. It is about service, about providing a personal touch and a warm interaction. When a customer reflects on the product in order to decide what next to purchase or to advise friends, a pleasant reflective memory can overcome any prior negative experiences.

Amusement park rides are a good example of the interplay between reflection and reaction. The ride appeals both to those who value the feelings that accompany high arousal and fear for its own sake and to those for whom the ride is all about the reflective power afterward. At
the visceral level, the whole point is to thrill riders, scaring them in the process. But this has to be done in a reassuring way. While the visceral system is operating at full force, the reflective system is a calming influence. This is a safe ride, it is telling the rest of the body. It only appears to be dangerous. It is okay. During the ride, the visceral system probably wins. But in retrospect, when memory has dimmed, the reflective system wins. Now, it is a badge of honor to have experienced the ride. It provides stories to tell other people. Here an effective amusement park enhances the interaction by selling photographs of the rider at the peak of the experience. They sell photographs and souvenirs, so the riders can brag to friends.

Would you go on a ride if the amusement park was old and shabby, with clearly broken components, rusty railings, and a general air of incompetence? Obviously not. The rational reassurance will not be nearly as effective. Once the reflective system fails, then the appeal is apt to collapse as well.

“You know what the hardest part of this design was?” Walter Herbst, of the design firm Herbst LaZar Bell, asked, proudly showing me the Motorola headset (
figure 3.8
).

“Reliability?” I answered, hesitantly, thinking that it looked so big and strong, it must be reliable.

“Nope,” he answered, “it was the coaches—making the coaches feel good about wearing it.”

Motorola had asked Herbst LaZar Bell to design the headset to be used by the coaches of the National Football League. Mind you, these couldn't be just any headset. They had to be highly functional, delivering intelligible messages between coaches and their staff scattered about the stadium. The microphone boom had to be movable so that it could be placed on either side of the head for left-handed and right-handed
coaches. The environment is a difficult one. It is noisy. Football games are played in temperature extremes, from high heat, to rain, to extreme cold. And headsets get abused: angry coaches take out their frustration on whatever happens to be around, sometimes grabbing hold of the microphone boom and throwing the headset to the ground. The signals have to be private so opposing teams cannot eavesdrop. The headset is also an important advertising symbol, exposing the Motorola name to television viewers, so the brand name has to be visible regardless of camera angle. And finally, the coaches have to be satisfied. They have to want to use it. So not only does the headset have to stand up to the rigors of the game, it has to be comfortable to wear for hours at a time.

Motorola's headset for the coaching staff of the National Football League.
The headset was designed by the industrial design firm Herbst LaZar Bell, which won a Gold Prize from both
Business Week's
Industrial Design Excellence Awards and the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) for their achievement. IDSA described the reasons this way: “It's a rare moment when a design team realizes that it has been given the green light to create an icon—one that will be seen by millions around the world. The Motorola NFL Headset represents the marriage of sophisticated communications technology and great design with the blood, sweat and tears on the field of play. In addition, it enhances awareness of a company committed to delivering on the demanding requirements of professional users in every arena.”
(Courtesy of Herbst LaZar Bell and Motorola, Inc.)

 

The headset design was a challenge. Small, lightweight headsets, though more comfortable, are not strong enough. More importantly, though, coaches rejected them. The coaches are the leaders of a large, active team. Football players are among the largest, most muscular players in team sports. The headset had to reinforce this image: it had to be muscular itself to convey the image of a coach in charge of things.

So, yes, the design had to have visceral appeal; and, yes, it had to meet the behavioral objectives. The biggest challenge, however, was to do all this while satisfying the coaches, projecting the heroic, manly self-image of strong, disciplined leaders who managed the world's toughest players, and who were always in control. In short: reflective design.

Accomplishing all this took a lot of work. This was not a design to be scribbled on the side of a napkin (although a lot of trial designs were, in fact, done on napkins). Sophisticated computer-aided drawing tools that allowed the designers to visualize just how the headset looked from all angles before anything had been built, optimizing the interaction of ear cups and microphone, headband adjustment, and even the placement of the logos (maximizing their visibility to the TV audience while simultaneously minimizing it to the coaches, to avoid distraction).

“The main goal in designing the Coaches Headset,” said Steve Remy, project manager for Herbst LaZar Bell, “was to create a cool new look for the product that is often overlooked as a background item, and turn it into an image-building product that attracts the viewer's attention even in the high energy, action-packed context of the professional football game.” It worked. The result is a “cool” product—one that not only functions well, but also serves as an effective
advertising tool for Motorola and enhances the self-image of the coaches. This is an excellent example of how the three different aspects of design can work well with one another.

To the practitioner of human-centered design, serving customers means relieving them of frustration, of confusion, of a sense of helplessness. Make them feel in control and empowered. To the clever salesperson, just the reverse is true. If people don't really know what they want, then what is the best way to satisfy their needs? In the case
of human-centered design, it is to provide them with the tools to explore by themselves, to try this and that, to empower themselves to success. To the sales staff, this is an opportunity to present themselves as rescuers “in-shining-armor,” ready to offer assistance, to provide just the answer customers will be led to believe they had been seeking.