Using design to create an emotional connection

Industrial design is not merely about a physical object; it is the overt, thoughtful development of the interaction points between you and your customer, according to Robert Brunner, Stewart Emery and Russ Hall in their book Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company. Effective design establishes the emotional relationship you develop with a brand through the total experience, to which a service or product provides a portal. Thus when you buy an iPhone you are buying the object and also the whole experience of how you can interact with the object and how it makes you feel.

The “Do you matter?” question in the book’s title aims to identify how passionate your customers are about the goods or services which your business offers. You matter to customers when they are emotionally invested in your continuing success. The function of great design is to create this sort of emotional connection through a product, without requiring live human interaction.

Designers love to make Apple a subject of their study, and by the end of the book I was feeling that I had heard far more about iPods than I will ever need to know. Other brands singled out for praise by the authors include Nike, Samsung, IKEA, Harley Davidson and BMW. Each has its own band of committed fans. Motorola, on the other hand, had a hit with the Razr but has failed to follow up that success with similar emotionally appealing designs.

I happened to read this book at the same time as Predictable Magic and, although the books are quite different, they both carry the message that the emotional connection that your design creates is far more important than the design’s functional aesthetics. In my view, other features such as marketing and after-sales service are sometimes more important than design in establishing that emotional connection, but the book does provide a good description of what a design needs to aim for.