🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA
This week from Archive & Collection: how to create emotion by design, make your portfolio not-boring, and how to use color in an evocative & accessible way.
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Happy Monday! We hope that everyone had another great weekend and is getting ready for Thanksgiving! 🦃️
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☘️ Industry — How Nike Creates Emotion by Design
Think about the last time you tried to change someone’s mind about something they really care about. Was it easier to change their mind by listing rational arguments or by appealing to their emotions? As humans, our emotions are the strongest factor in deciding how we think, feel, and behave. So as a designer, to truly impact someone, you need to provoke & connect to their emotions. This article explains 12 key ways to create emotion through design. Using curiosity and empathy to create emotion is the key to powerful storytelling - here’s how Nike does it! 🙆
📖 A few key points:
🧐 Use empathy to step outside of experience bias (the tendency to think that our perspective is the objective truth, and fail to remember that others see the world differently than we do).
👁️ Curiosity is a muscle. Practiced curiosity creates a willingness to search for inspiration in the unlikeliest places, allowing innovative thinking.
👯♀️ Creativity is a team sport - cultivate diverse teams. The greater the cognitive diversity, the more individuals are willing to share their thoughts, challenge one another, and produce innovative ideas.
🍿 Make the “movie poster”. Our brain processes images more than 15.6x faster than text. Using images & visual mediums to convey ideas quickly lets you reach someone’s emotions faster.
🌾 Opinion — Your Portfolios Are F*cking Boring
Nowadays, if you Google “UX design portfolio”, you’ll probably be bombarded with simple, aesthetic portfolios that feel like templates rather than people. Here’s a frustration letter from a design hiring manager on how the art of storytelling has been lost on the new generation of designers. 🥺
Quick question for you: what is the purpose of your portfolio? Is it just to have your work out there on the Internet? Or rather, especially for students trying to get hired, is your portfolio a medium to tell the story of yourself to someone trying to figure out what kind of person you are? 🤔
📖 What does Melody want us to know?
🌅 Your work is a story, not a successful case study. While it’s important to show your best work, showing failure tells the story of how you learned & improved. The hiring manager is deciding whether to hire you, not your project.
🏔️ Personal branding & storytelling is incredibly powerful. Hiring managers aren't just looking at technical skillsets; they're looking at the person that you are and whether or not they want to work with you.
☀️ What story are you trying to tell? If a complete stranger looked through your portfolio, what kind of person would they think you are?
🪴 Skill — Using Color to Create Emotion
Now that you know the power of emotion and the importance of presenting yourself, color is one of your most powerful allies in doing so through design. Here’s a great article about what colors are associated with what emotion. Being intentional with color allows you to elicit specific emotions in the user (side note: here’s an article on words to use other than “user”), guiding them towards specific actions and coloring (mentally, not literally 😅) how they remember the experience you’ve designed for them.
For more hands on experience in the world of colors, check out this interactive guide to color & contrast. The content covers visual impairments, color appearance phenomena, properties of color, color mixing & models, UI & data visualization, and much more!
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this work are Alana Wu, Sean Shen, and Rebecca Jiang.
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