Reddit reviews Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

What's worked for me really well was learning about the different roles that a UX oriented person can do. There are a lot of various hats you can wear under the UX umbrella like Interaction Designer, Information Architecture, User Research, and a few more from there.

I'd suggest doing your research, learning as much as you can whether that be reading the latest posts on blogs, reading books or even jumping on twitter and contacting some really great ux'ers out there right now.

I'm a designer that's slowly making the transition too, and this is what worked out really well for me, not saying it's going to be your answer but hopefully some of it helps!

I use www.uxmag.com to just read some articles and keep up to date on what people think within the field.

The best learning that I've had so far though would be from books that I've had suggested to me from various UX designers within the industry right now:

Emotional Design


Project Guide To UX Design

If you want to keep chatting about it feel free to PM me and I'll help out as much as I can! :)

Read https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Design-Love-Everyday-Things/dp/0465051367 it was recommended in the audiobook that talks about apple and how they approach design called Design Like Apple

This probably isn't the most helpful answer, but any resources I might have used to learn the fundamentals myself are probably pretty outdated now. Honestly I'd just try to find highly rated books on Amazon that are reasonably priced. I haven't read this one for psych research methods, but looking through the table of contents, it covers a lot of what I'd expect (ethics, validity and reliability, study design and common methods) and according to the reviews it's clear, concise, and has good stats info in the appendix. I had a similar "handbook" style textbook in undergrad that I liked. For practicing stats, I'm personally more of a learn-by-doing kind of person, and there are some free courses out there like this one from Khan Academy that covers the basics fairly well.

But if you can, take courses in college as electives! Chances are you'll have a few to fill (or maybe audit some if you can't get credit), so go outside of HCDE's offerings to get some complementary skills in research or design. I usually find classrooms to be more engaging than trying to get through a textbook at home on my own, and especially for psych research methods, you'll probably have a project that gives you hands-on experience doing research with human subjects (most likely your peers). There are lots of free online courses out there as well if you aren't able to take them for credit.

You guys are making me miss school.

Getting specifically into UX self-study, in addition to a UX-specific research methods book (this is a newer version of one I read in school) I'd also go through the UX classics like Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design, Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and Casey's Set Phasers on Stun (this last one being more of a fun read than a practical one).

First, congratulations!

I'm a Design Studies grad student, so the ethics of objects is something that I might be able to help with. It sounds to me like you've got a flurry of concerns, and could use a compass to point you in the right direction.

Here's a miniature framework:

1. What is the main goal for the object itself? What does it need to be/perform?
   
2. What are the prohibitions? What cannot be done in the pursuit of such an object?
   
   Your answer might differ, but for me, the answer to #1 is something along the lines of, "Evoke the emotions you feel for each other." There is no blueprint for designing sentimental-on-the-shelf objects, but there is literature on how to design objects that encourage owners to make them sentimental. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Don Norman is respected and accessible. Engagement rings certainly aren't everyday objects, but I think it'll help reveal what qualities of the object will facilitate the intended emotional purpose of the object. My gut feeling is that for you and your significant other, a diamond would be a counterproductive choice because the diamond itself would evoke values that you know your partner finds abhorrent. A simpler example might be that if you know your partner is allergic to mint, then buying them mint ice cream can easily be hurtful because the object (mint ice cream) evokes negative emotions (not listening, or not caring).
   
   As for #2, it sounds like you already know some things that you find ethically intolerable. The solution must not be environmentally unfriendly, support unfair labor practices, or otherwise be unsustainable. I'm also sure that there are non-ethical considerations as well (budget, your partner hates the color red, etc).
   
   Once you've pinned down some clear goals and showstoppers, you can begin imagining and comparing possible solutions. What if you sourced the material components during a trip? What if you and your partner went to a workshop and made the rings for each other by hand? What if the rings didn't have a centerpiece gem at all? You can come up with a whole bunch of idea that will achieve the goals while avoiding the showstoppers, but first you have to identify the goals and showstoppers. You already skipped ahead to the generative phase, so after you get them written down, I think you'll be fine.
   
   And since this is /r/ethics, I'd absolutely encourage you to pick up a book like Normative Ethics by Shelly Kagan. Ethics is one of those fields where everybody thinks they're an expert because they're confident in their collection of opinions, but it really is helpful to get away from "Is it ethical?" and toward "Is it ethical according to utliatarianism/deontologicalism/virtue ethics/egoism/whatever?" Different ethical theories will give you different answers to any question, so asking "Is it ethical?" without defining an ethical theory is sort of a trick question in a forum devoted to the academic field of ethics. In the context of your original question, I think knowing which specific ethical theory you subscribe to will hell you pinpoint what are and aren't requirements for your solution.
   
   Good luck!

I'm delighted to see this kind of topic here, as flow is one of my main design goals when designing anything. I might go so far as say it is part of my core game design philosophy.

That said, there are several subjects that other users have covered very well here, that I think you should look into, but...

>I realized that RPGs very rarely, if ever, come into a state of flow.

I think the thing to look out for here, is that RPGs are a complex activity, highly idiosyncratic and, because of that, flow can happen within different aspects of it.

A flow in narrative immersion is what I aim for but, as players tend to focus on different parts of the activity, it is perfectly possible to create a game focused on achieving flow through, i.e. combat strategy and knowledge of the system on a reflective level¹.

To achieve flow, therefore, you need, I believe, certain things to be in agreement:

1. The players need to relate to RPGs roughly in the same manner. While it is possible to, with time, adapt the playstyle of the group to something that satisfies players individually, it is hard to concile, for example, a power player with a player that focuses more on roleplaying and narrative, depending on how extreme their behaviours are;
   
   
2. The system needs to agree with the group's overall sentiment. A freeform narrative type of system might get in the way of a group seeking more tactical, rules-heavy combat, and will detract from the kind of flow the group is seeking, while a rules-heavy system with miniatures and grids and tables might inconvenience players that are more interested in the roleplay aspect of RPGs.
   
   ¹ I'd recommend you reading Norman's Emotional Design, as it has some pretty direct parallels to concepts used by the SRK Model that /u/Brokugan mentioned.

> Am I to infer that companies mostly care about it for PR reasons?

Legal, actually. If your work is an education, or heathcare, or any number of other things, the ADA can require you to be accessible. But, most consumer websites are pretty bad about accessibility. I consider usability and accessibility to be distinct, definitely similar, but usability is about patterns and accessibility is.. well, also about patterns, but has a lot more of a code component to it.

In theory, a website who's content is contained in well structured HTML should be fairly accessible by default, at least by technologies like screen readers. You run into trouble in style, things like colors in particular. Use colors to convey meaning in a way where the meaning is lost on a black and white color scheme? Inaccessible. Use text colors on backgrounds that don't have a high enough contrast ratio for things like buttons? Inaccessible. Those are the kinds of things someone who designs for some kinds of fields have to deal with, but the folks at Reddit don't really have to concern themselves with. If they do, it's out of PR, or ethics.

The 90/5/5 rule isn't a hard and fast one, but within the subject of accessibility it is just a reapplication. You might say accessibility targets the 90 percent of users in the middle of some imaginary impairment spectrum. The point of the 90/5/5 rule is really more philosophic than mathamatic: It is basically saying you will never design a system that works for literally everyone. Never.

On this second point, one thing I have to point out immediately is that usability studies are primarily industry-driven. Usability standards and research academically was big in the 1980s, but the academic side of HCI has moved on from "quaint" notions like usability. It is the industry, no academia, that drives that now. The sources I posted for instance, are industry sources, one of them, Nielson-Norman Group, gets paid ungodly sums of money to do usability audits of commercial websites.

The truth is people's preferences are not based on usability, they're based on affect. There's a great, groundbreaking book on this that if you're truly interested in you should read, called Emotional Design: Why we Love or Hate Everyday Things. The author, Don Norman, is the "Norman" in Nielson-Norman Group. Here's a big takeaway, if someone loves or hates software, or any tool, is often not based on how usable it is. People don't make those kinds of decisions on logic, they make them on emotion.

Good UX work should include the affective nature of design. It isn't pure science, it shouldn't treat people like robots, and it should acknowledge that people's preferences are non-scientific and should be accounted for in an emotional way. But, that's not usability. Usability is the more scientific side of UX, the part the measures how well something works. Probably the reason I've gotten so much flak for daring to stand up for any aspect of the reddit redesign is that I'm defending it's usability, which has nothing to do with its likeability. A distinction that is second nature to me, because I'm a professional in this field, but obviously is not to others.

My point is, and has been from the beginning, the new reddit design is not unusable. In fact, it likely is more usable than the original reddit design. People hating it is not based on its usability.

I've never seen the movie objectified, but I love this book:

Robin Williams, The Non-Designer's Design Book

edit: After a quick look at IMDB, you may want to try a Donald Norman book like:

• The Design of Everyday Things
  
• Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
  
  edit2: WTF, I suck at formatting.