Negative Emotions

In This Course, You'll

• Get excited to move past what just works well and looks good as you learn to design products and experiences people love. Every morning your alarm goes off, you shuffle to the kitchen, and you start your daily ritual. Still half-asleep, you boil the kettle, scoop the coffee, and add the milk. And out of every mug you own, you reach for the same one. Every single time. We all have things we choose over and over, sometimes without knowing why. It feels like instinct, but that pull comes from emotional design: It's not just what a product does, but how it makes you feel each time you use it. It's why some things earn a place in our lives while others, even when they're just as functional, get forgotten in a drawer. In this course, design legend and author of the bestselling book "Human-Computer Interaction," Professor Alan Dix, shows you how to use psychology to design for emotion, so that the feelings your product evokes are intentional, not accidental.

• Make yourself invaluable when you can turn products and experiences that are functional into ones that make people actually feel. In this course you'll learn why people fall in love with some things and abandon others, using Don Norman's three levels of design to make sense of why people respond the way they do. You'll understand the cognitive and affective systems running in every user's head, so you can shape how your work feels before anyone consciously thinks about it. Through Maslow's hierarchy and MacLean's three brains, you'll ground what you build in the instincts, emotions, and reasoning every user carries with them. And with real examples from brands like Apple and Swatch, you'll see how your design choices can earn that connection. AI has made it possible to build more products faster and cheaper than ever, and users are now flooded with endless options. Your timeless, human-centered design skills are what let you look past the screen to the human on the other side, so the people who use what you build feel understood.

• Gain confidence and credibility because when you design for emotion, you build things that genuinely serve people, earn their trust, and keep them coming back. Emotion is often treated as the soft, unprovable part of design, but according to Gallup, behavioral economists estimate that up to 70% of consumer decisions are driven by emotion rather than logic. In this course, you'll learn to make the business case for emotional design and trade "it just feels better" for a clear explanation of what's working, why it matters, and what you can do about it. You'll also see why a beautiful design isn't just nice to look at: Research shows people perceive attractive things as more usable, even when their actual experience suggests otherwise. And with downloadable templates like the 5 Principles of Humanity-Centered Design, you'll apply your skills immediately.

Learn From Industry Leaders

Master complex skills with proven best practices and toolkits directly from industry leaders. Meet your expert for this course:

• Alan Dix: Author of the bestselling book “Human-Computer Interaction” and Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University.