So, I have been reading this new book,
Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things. I am really loving it so far. I feel, the more I learn about the psychology and emotional connection people feel with design, the better I can be at creating well thought out experiences for people to enjoy on the web.
On the train this morning I finished the 2nd chapter. I was very inspired, and wanted to share this quote with you.
“In the early 1950s, the Betty Crocker Company introduced a cake mix so that people could readily make excellent tasting cakes at home. No muss, no fuss: just add water, mix and bake. The product failed, even though taste test confirmed that people liked the results. Why? An after-the-fact effort was made to find the reasons. As the market researchers Bonnie Goebert and Herma Rosenthal put it: “The cake mix was a little too simple. The consumer felt no sense of accomplishment, no involvement with the product. It made her feel useless, especially if somewhere her aproned Mom was sitting whipping up cakes from scratch."
Yes, it was too easy to make the cake. Betty Crocker solved the problem by requiring the cook to add an egg to the mix, thereby putting pride back into the activity. Clearly, adding an egg to a prepared cake is not at all equivalent to baking a cake “from scratch” by using individual ingredients. Nonetheless, the adding the egg gave the act of baking a sense of accomplishment, whereas just mixing mixing water into the cake mix made it seem a little, too artificial. Goebert and Rosenthal summarized the situation: “The real problem had nothing to do with the product’s intrinsic value, but instead represented the emotional connection that links a product to it’s user.” Yes, it’s all about the emotion, about pride, about the feeling of accomplishment, even in making a cake from a prepared mix.”
