Visceral, Behavioural, Reflective - a Reflection

your friendly UX designer was asked this week to go hunting around for examples of visceral (initial impact / appearance), behavioural (functionality), and reflective (message it gives about owner's taste). it has not been an easy search i can assure you (considering how each of them overlaps, and how the companies try to sell them with all 3 design emotions in mind)... but i've tried to find something (and hopefully its a good comparison)... and awaaaaaay we go!

Subject of comparison: LAPTOPS (i.e. laptop BRANDS and the images they portray)

Brands being compared: Apple, IBM (or is it Lenovo?) and.... Sony? (ok the last example was pretty difficult to find).

so now that we have the participants, let's play a little guessing game...

The Apple Macbook

"AHHHHH! MACBOOK BLACK!!!! I WANT!!!!"

I've had friends who've been DYING (and i do mean DYING) to get their hands on a Macbook, the black one especially. One particular one had this reaction when she saw a black Mac at the co-op "AHHHHH!!! i WANT!!!" which in my opinion is rather representative of most people who want a Mac (a rather insightful friend pointed out designers don't count. they use Macs for functionality, not cos it looks "cool"- you gotta be pretty "cool" to begin with if you wanna be a designer, so they don't need that extra boost).

So... based on the dominant reaction of all those people lusting after Macbooks (the black one especially), i'd say that the dominant design characteristic would be VISCERAL (though reflective could come in a close second because of the "cool" factor").

IBM / Lenovo



A quote from a friend about IBM / Lenovo laptops: "Reliable, no-nonsense and hardy. but its damn ugly lah!!!!"


Ok. After asking around for a few people's opinions, this is my conclusion about the impression (and "reputation) of IBM / Lenovo laptops: No-nonsense, reliable, can take all sorts of hits and maintain intact (i have a friend who's laptop has taken major abuse and still works pretty fine). Functionality wise, it comes with all sorts of stuff that you get with every other laptop, but is built to take more hits (and more importantly, survive them). So... i guess that would make it a BEHAVIOURAL-type design (i can't say much for visceral or reflective elements...)


Sony Vaio

the PC vs Mac vs Vaio advertisement (the "non-pc pc"? er... right. a PC by another shape or colour is still a PC):

So anyway... At first when i took a look at this ad (and the sony Vaio in general) i wondered to myself... is this more reflective? or visceral? I mean, i could easily file this under REFLECTIVE and end off my post, but i want to elaborate a little on the difficulty in this area (the other 2 were pretty much no-brainers). Reflective design is supposed to say something about the owner of the product, no? and the only way to get that across is to build brand image and perception. If that's the case, i can very easily just take one of those HP laptops as an example (especially with their "The computer is personal again" ads (which are rather well done i should think).

Then i realised unlike Visceral and Behavioural design, REFLECTIVE design is not only personal, but also a matter of how that perception is built (like through advertising). And I think Sony's above-shown ad would be an example of trying to push for the idea that it classifies as REFLECTIVE design in the sense that it makes you "cooler" than a dude who owns a mac (which would DEFINITELY say something about you).