The book Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter is book about creating more emotion on websites.

Personalizing websites is a relatively new concept on the web, the idea was born from the burst of the dot-com bubble, “All of those people who were laid off or fired…started to make new websites and applications…,but the voice of these new sites was decidedly more personal.” (Walters, 3). Growing up in the age of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr the idea of no personalization in websites never crossed my mind. I am used to people sharing personal information, sometimes oversharing but that’s part of what makes the sites so popular is connecting with others through the web. After reading this chapter I realized that in the beginning people were not so lucky, they kept emotion out of their websites and even used the word ‘we’ “trying to create the perception that I was a big company” (Walters, 3).

Walters introduces Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid which has safety near the bottom of the pyramid. Maslow suggests that the human need for a sense of safety is where we find happiness. I disagree with this because humans need some adventure and risk for happiness. If you lead a stagnant life you won’t find happiness. I believe in the cliché of living life to fullest and that involves loosing your sense of safety a little, stepping outside your comfort zone.

I’ll end with my favorite quote of the chapter: “Though the industrial revolution sprang from a utopian vision of the human progress, humans were so often the ones left behind” (Walters, 1). I like this quote because if you focus to much on the future you can loose sight of who you are and living in the present.

Originally posted at Grace Vojvoda