Natalia Fisher

emotional design & document editing processes

This week we covered emotional design in my human behavior course. Our design exercise was to create versions of Google Docs for documents with faraway faraway deadlines versus documents with looming deadlines, focusing especially on the visceral (initial visual appearance) and behavioral (look and feel).

The exercise made me think of two of my favorite non-traditional word processors which are designed to help you write through encouraging distinct emotional states:

OmmWriter, which feels like a more beautiful, zen-like extension of distraction free full-screen editors such as WriteRoom and Writer.

Write or Die, which takes a completely different approach!

For our exercise, my group ended up an editor with three stages: 1. A free-form space (similar to what OneNote offers) where you can start typing anywhere in the editing space and can drag around blocks of text and making simple drawings. This would be for the initial brainstorming stage of a document, when the deadline is faraway. 2. A lined note paper view with minimal formatting options (and maybe even a cheesy handwriting or typewriter font). This is the stage for more formal outlining or a rough draft. 3. A print view with complete formatting options, that more or less resembles how Google Docs already appears by default - your writing appears on a white page with 1 inch margins, more or less how it will look in its final form.

Kevin also brought up the question of how one might redesign presentation software in a similar way. This was really interesting to me because while I have a somewhat established process for writing essays (that is largely reflected in the 3 stages we came up with above), I don’t have much experience creating presentations and have no idea where to start. If I just open up Powerpoint, I’m greeted with this screen:

Which suggests the way to start is to jump in and create my first slide, and then my second slide, and then my third slide, etc. until I’m done. Is that really how we should be creating presentations? Does any experienced presenter go about it that way? My guess is, probably not. I would guess that more often they start with some kind of script or outline for what they want to cover, and then later on determine exactly what content should actually go on individual slides. Why don’t we have software that encourages this process?