Designing for Emotion
By Aarron Walter
Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter is a foundational text for anyone seeking to create digital experiences that resonate on a human level. Drawing from psychology, storytelling, and interface design, the book teaches readers how to build trust and delight through emotional design. Walter shows how emotional connection—often overlooked in UX—can be a strategic advantage that drives user engagement and loyalty. You’ll learn practical techniques for using personality, surprise, and visual cues to forge meaningful interactions between users and products, with insights that have been applied at companies like Mailchimp, Zappos, and Apple.
Lauded by design leaders like Jeffrey Zeldman (“This is the book I wish I had written”) and Jason Fried of Basecamp, Designing for Emotion has been called “timeless” and “essential” reading for product teams. In this updated edition, Walter includes fresh examples and expands on how emotional design principles apply across platforms and at scale. Whether you’re designing your first product or evolving a mature system, this book will help you make deeper connections with your users—by making your products feel more human.
Length: 143 pages
Available in PDF and epub formats, free for Design Better Premium subscribers
We’ve seen by now that digital experiences not only delight and empower people, but can also destroy and depress them. Aarron’s reboot addresses these darker concerns while still exhibiting the unfettered optimism he’s brought to the intersection of creative expression and business.
John Maeda, VP Engineering, Head of Computational Design / AI Platform
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Business leaders everywhere are now appreciating the power of design. But what exactly is that power? This book breaks down what design is really about, and how to go beyond functional and usable to truly delightful. Chock-full of simple yet powerful concepts and relatable examples, this book will have you feeling more inspired and capable of making wonderful things.
Every now and then a book comes along that changes the way you think about the web. This is one of them. The web is made for humans, and Designing for Emotion does a fantastic job explaining how to keep that in mind. Two swissmiss thumbs up!
Tina Roth Eisenberg, Founder of Swissmiss and Creative Mornings
What’s in Designing for Emotion
Emotional design
This chapter introduces the core premise of the book—that emotionally intelligent design can create more memorable, engaging, and effective user experiences—and lays out the business case for why emotion matters in product design.
Designing for humans
Explore how human psychology and behavior shape user expectations, and how designing with empathy for cognitive and emotional needs leads to more intuitive, human-centered products.
Personality
Learn how to craft and apply a unique brand personality that brings warmth, relatability, and distinction to your product, helping it stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Empathy and inclusion
This chapter emphasizes designing for a broad spectrum of users by recognizing bias, practicing inclusive design, and embedding empathy into every stage of the design process.
Emotional engagement
Understand how to evoke emotional responses—like joy, surprise, and delight—through microinteractions, thoughtful details, and storytelling techniques that deepen user connection.
Trust, fear, and forgiveness
Delve into the emotional dynamics of trust and fear in user experience, and learn how to design interfaces that comfort, support, and gracefully recover from failure.
The business of emotional design
Learn how to connect emotional design to business outcomes, showing how emotional resonance drives customer loyalty, advocacy, and long-term product success—and how to advocate for it within your organization.
Emotion can be a fuzzy word, but with Aarron Walter’s expertise and insight, you’ll learn how to turn it into an advantage for your business.
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Designing for Emotion: Learn how to design products that inspire trust, overcome user fears, and create lasting impressions with this classic that’s inspired teams at The White House, Intuit, Google, and more.
Design Systems Handbook: Learn to design, deploy, and drive adoption of a design system in your organization with this book written by experts from Github, Salesforce, Pinterest, Etsy, and Shopify.
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Principles of Product Design: There is a proven recipe for making great products, and this book lays it all out with real-world examples of the best design teams.
About the author
Aarron Walter is a design and technology leader, and co-host of the Webby-nominated Design Better Podcast. He founded the user experience practice at Mailchimp, helping the company grow from a few thousand users to tens of millions. At InVision, he led research into the inner workings of top design teams at companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Google to uncover what drives their success.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Aarron joined former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden at Resolve to Save Lives, applying design and technology to support emergency response efforts at the WHO, Africa CDC, and U.S. public health departments.
He’s the author of several books, including the second edition of Designing for Emotion, and has advised the White House, the U.S. Department of State, and dozens of leading companies, startups, and venture capital firms.
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