Digital Intuition

Functional design vs emotive design

Design can be described as functional, emmotive, any shade of grey in between or neither (otherwise know as bad). Functional design is normally the kind of design you see in applications it’s clean, effective even “pretty” but it aim is to make functionality usable not illicit an emmotion response or manipulate the user.

Emmotional design is the kind of design you see in websites and advertising. It’s used to build brands and manipulated the users opinian of a company, product or service.

Whilst there are many instance where both are needed together there are also many instances where one should be used almost exclusively.

I believe one such example is desktop applications. I’ve paid for a functional piece of software and every effort in it’s design should be honde on making it as usable as possible.

And I’m not alone in this oppinion. Notice how the only piece of branding in Photoshop is limited to the spash screen, about screen and a few hundred pixels at the top of the toolbox. This is because Adobe understands that once you’ve downloaded the software the best way to boost your opinion of their brand and products is to make them as effecient as possible. The time for trying to pusuade you of the company’s creditibility, experience and ability with graphics, copy or otherwise ended (at least for the time being) when you downloaded and opened their app.

Trying to build emmotive design into an application’s user interface is generally wasted and does not conform to the follow principle of design:

Good design is a simple as it can be.

Delibar is a good example where the designer has added in some textures into the app that do nothing for it’s usibility, in fact they do nothing to build the apps brand either. They are therefore just there for the sake of it and that is not good design.

There are plenty of apps where building brands and opinions is there goal and for these a more creative flare is necessary. If that is not your goal do not make the solution any more complicated than it needs to be. Not to be confused with the comman misconception that less is more, but that is another story…