Personas, Goals, and Emotional Design

Speaker
Robert Reimann
Manager, User Interface Design, Bose Design Center

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Earlier this year, Donald Norman sent a jolt through the design world with his latest book, Emotional Design, in which he suggests that people react to the design of products on three distinct levels, a “visceral” level dominated by initial reaction to appearances, a “behavioral” level dominated by cognitive responses to interactivity, and a “reflective” level, dominated by long-term relationships and associations that humans form with products. However, he does not detail any specific methods for ensuring that these different ways that people understand and relate to a designed product are accounted for during the conceptualization and execution of the product’s design.

Personas, goals, and scenarios provide a powerful means of accounting for specific user needs and inclinations when developing product design frameworks. I will discuss how three different types of persona goals—which map very closely to Norman’s three levels of design—help permit design frameworks to be created that address all three levels of human-product interaction described by Norman.

Speaker's Bio

Robert Reimann has spent the last 15 years pushing the boundaries of digital products as a designer, writer, lecturer, manager, and consultant. He has led dozens of interaction design projects in domains including e-commerce, desktop productivity, authoring environments, medical and scientific instrumentation, kiosks, information systems, and consumer electronics, for startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. As Director of Design R&D at Cooper, Robert helped develop and refine the interaction design methodologies described in About Face 2.0, co-authored with Alan Cooper. He has lectured on these methods at major universities and to international industry audiences. Robert is a past member of the advisory board of the Berkeley Institute of Design, and a current national steering committee member for AIGA Experience Design. Robert is currently leads the user interface design organization for Bose Corporation’s Home Entertainment, Live Music, Noise Reduction, and Professional Audio Divisions. He lives in Brookline, MA.

Host
Jodi Forlizzi