Attractive Things Work Better!

I had never really thought about this before, but it seems really logical after reading about it.

More Attractive Product –> User Feels Good –> User Can Think Creativly

Being able to go through the three different levels of the brain and showing how they work on an individual and collaborative scale. An interesting distinction that the reading made was that the visceral processing analyzes a situation and responds to it, but behavioral processing analyzes the situation and adapts the behavior accordingly. This distinction is very slight, but it’s important for understanding the applications of these different levels.

One part I really resonated with was when the reading outlined the musical aspect of behavioral and reflective processing and how reflective may often drop out while behavioral remains. I don’t know how many times I’ll play guitar and mess up as soon as I start thinking about what my next move is. This behavior, everyday/fixed routine sort of processing is what allows for muscle memory to form and it seems that reflective processing, while it does have its place, has to be supplemental to that muscle memory.

An example that I clearly remember is one day, my flute instructor played an entire song while I listed off what I did over my weekend. Once he was done playing, he repeated back to me everything that I had done over the weekend. This, I believe, is an example of behavioral processing helping him to keep playing while his reflective processing takes over the weekend plans.

I’m interested in how I can implement these processing levels in my future designs, now that we’ve read about how they truly impact the user experience.