Negative Emotions

Your constantly-updated definition of Negative Emotions and collection of videos and articles

What are Negative Emotions?

Negative emotion or affect is the experience of feeling negative emotions such as anger, frustration, guilt, nervousness and fear. Inducing negative emotions in your users as they experience your user interface is one of many ways your product could fail. Therefore, it is important to learn how to prevent negative affect in your user experience and induce positive emotions instead.

Literature on Negative Emotions

Here’s the entire UX literature on Negative Emotions by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Negative Emotions

Take a deep dive into Negative Emotions with our course Emotional Design — How to Make Products People Will Love .

What separates great products from good ones? Attractive designs? User testing? Genius designers? Well, these might be contributory factors, but the true distinction lies in how they make users feel. Every experience has an emotional component, and using products is no different. Incorporating emotion should therefore be a key consideration when designing products or websites. This course will provide you with an understanding of emotional responses and how to create designs that encourage them.

An understanding of emotional design—how users feel and what affects these feelings—is essential if you want to provide great user experiences. There are probably things near you right now that are not necessarily the best, and they might not even be particularly attractive, but you are nonetheless still using them. Take a seashell from your favorite beach, or your very first tennis racket, for example; they are meaningful to you, and you consequently feel a connection to them. These connections are powerful; they subconsciously affect you and have the capacity to turn inanimate objects into evocative extensions of you as an individual.

In this course, we will provide you with the information necessary to elicit such positive emotional experiences through your designs. Human-computer interaction (HCI) specialist Alan Dix provides video content for each of the lessons, helping to crystallize the information covered throughout the course. By the end of it, you will have a better understanding of the relationship between people and the things they use in their everyday lives and, more importantly, how to design new products and websites which elicit certain emotional responses.

All open-source articles on Negative Emotions

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