Have you ever thought what makes things ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Why do people like one thing and hate others? Aarron Walter has found the answer to this question and you can find it in his book “Designing for Emotions“.

I have read this book and would like to share a few secrets with you on how to use knowledge about emotions in website creation and in the promotion of your products and services. To understand the issue better you can watch Don Norman’s video "3 Ways Good Designs Make You Happy" , one more experienced specialist in this field.

We face a huge number of generic and repetitive website designs but monotony is definitely not the best tool to attract customers.

Often all the attempts of website creators to stand out from the crowd break down. Instead of attracting customers, developers and designers push them away. So does it take to create a website that will attract clients like a magnet?

Recommended Reading: 30 Quick Ideas to Make your Website Look Nicer

Key Elements of Emotional Design

There are tons of books and guides all over the Web on how to create a right website design: add beautiful images, combine typography and colors, write interesting texts, and follow the latest web trends. But none of them will tell you how to create a website that may impress visitors so deeply that they will keep coming back.

The answer is quite simple (like all genius things are), you should evoke positive emotions, emotions like:

• pleasure
• joy
• surprise (do something unexpected and pleasant)
• attention (a suggestion for help, even if you’re not obliged to)
• expectation (tell something interesting before the launch)
• exclusivity (suggest something exclusive to people from your niche, for example, housewives)
• anticipation combined with a strong personality

All these factors are the basis of emotional design. However, appropriate tactics should be chosen for each specific brand and target audience. Let’s take a look at a few good examples of websites that put knowledge about emotional design into practice.

Human Nature

Parents love their children, even when they cry all the time and challenge your sense of smell with their poo, but why do parents endure this? Our brain perceives the proportion of child’s face (big eyes and a tiny nose) as something special, innocent and fragile.

The baby’s look evokes a sense of trust and love. Looking at a defenseless child’s face, you forget about how demanding they are and submit wholeheartedly. The same logic is applied to the use of cartoons. Here are some examples:

MailChimp

Netbluez

OurBabyBox

I’m pretty sure that you know plenty of websites that use this principle to create an emotional connection with their audience.

Smile

Design of the Volkswagen Beetle car is recognized as the most successful in the history of vehicle construction. Its headlights look like eyes the rounded hood makes it look like it is smiling at you. This is human-like in design, which has helped many Beetle owners feel a personal connection to it.

If a person that you like smiles at you, you smile back. And it works on the websites too. Take a look at the launched page of these websites:

Your Karma

GOEasy Cloud

You want to smile too, don’t you? You think that this particular product or service makes these people feel happy and in response, you want to buy it too. It’s a smart marketing step.

Humor

As I have mentioned before, to hook a visitor you should do something unexpected and evoke only positive feelings. It’s like when you fail to enter the right website address on Freakify’s 404 page.

If you push “I will shoot you? YES! Shoot me” you may be pretty surprised with the results.

Another funny 404 page is that of Apartment Home Living website.

If you move your cursor over the toilet, you will get:

The website that makes you laugh will be remembered. It can even become viral, because you might want to share the joke with friends.

Attention

If you do something to show that you care about your every visitors, he or she will appreciate and remember it. For example, take a look at this website, Xixi.

The mascot on Xixi asks “Do you want me to be your English translator?”. Click yes then enter your name in a field, and when you hover your cursor over a word, the mascot translates it for you. How’s that for personalized attention?

Details

You should pay attention to detail like how Photojojo does. There is a shopping cart on every page of Photojojo website. It’s gray and unhappy.

But if you add an item to the cart, it becomes happy and green. It’s an amazing example of emotional design.

Moreover, there is one more cool detail on the page. There is a lever with the instruction: Do not pull near the photo of the product. Of course, curious visitors will pull it anyway. Give it a go and see what it has in store for you.

Another shop that uses elements of emotional design is Threadless. Here is one more example of a “happy shopping cart” on T-shirt online shop.

If you remove the items from a cart, it becomes "sad and lonely". Aww….

Oops, Trouble

You can turn trouble with your service into advantages like how Tumblr does it. A big blogging platform like that has no time for breaks, but occasionally things don’t go as planned. These two down pages show how they tackle the situation effectively.

Tumblr – We’ll be back shortly

A funny and unusual “Tumblr is down” page will appease and soothe your anger.

Tumblr – We’re very sorry

Here’s one that reminds you that there are more serious problems in your life than your Tumblr page not working.

Wrap Up

I have collected this stuff to show you how different brands express their personality by putting emotions into design. How would you approach design using emotions? Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comment section below.

Everybody is connected, and it’s as easy as pie for companies and their recruiters to run a quick search on their prospective employees to find out about their attitudes toward work and assess their suitability for the job.

As a matter-of-fact, Dan Schawbel from Forbes goes as far as to suggest that our online presence will replace our resume in the near future. Given such an emerging trend, it is high time we become cognizant of what the Internet has to say about us. In the midst of a job-switch, it’s good practice to keep your online profiles presentable and optimized for your future employment opportunities.

You never know if a headhunter has ever considered you as a potential candidate for an attractive post but decided not to because of your less-than-appealing online presence. Follow these 10 simple and practical tips on managing your social profiles to make them resume-ready and increase your odds of getting the interview.

Recommended Reading: First Job Interview: 10 Things You Should Know

1. Stay Well-Versed with Changes in Privacy

If you’ve read my earlier post on 5 Facebook Privacy Settings You Should Know and Facebook & Your Privacy: Why It Matters, you would’ve realize by now how important it is to keep abreast of revisions to privacy policies on Facebook and other social network sites.

These policies determine how searchable your profile is and how you can restrict access to your postings. You will need to enable your potential employers to search for your profile page effortlessly. Be wary of what you make public (and accessible by them) to accurately portray you in the manner you want.

A Buggy Issue

Apart from such privacy settings, it is also necessary to make a conscious effort to stay informed about existing bugs and get them fixed before they leave you vulnerable to any privacy leak. It would be disastrous if all your private photos and postings were available to your prospective employers during a routine background search.

Facebook users have not forgotten the recent Facebook privacy glitch late last year when private messages that weren’t supposed to be public had seemingly appeared publicly on their wall page.

2. Be Public

Access restrictions aside, stay public in general. It makes sense to say that you wouldn’t have any online presence if you don’t appear online! Besides robbing your chance to impress recruiters, a blocked social network profile may also raise a red flag, giving the impression that you have things to hide.

Since an overwhelming 93% of employers use LinkedIn to headhunt candidates, it’s definitely a must for you to publicize your LinkedIn profile in order to appear in search results. The same applies to other social network sites like Facebook (66%) and Twitter (54%).

3. Utilize Your Limited Bio Space

The description for your social network bio plays a big role in attracting the attention of employers. On Facebook for instance, within a limited space, you are to summarize your experience, personality, interests, skills, what you can offer to the employers and presumably more. Technically, it is something like a resume.

A bio is actually more conversational and can be used to provide more information about you than any standard resume could.

Cater to Different Profiles

Note that your bio will differ depending on your networking platform. For LinkedIn, it is expected for your bio to reveal your experience and expertise, your educational background along with various accomplishments in your career.

You can be less formal when it comes to your personal blog or Facebook profile and perhaps include some light-hearted materials from your personal life. However, always be critical about the words and phrases you use because recruiters pay special attention to certain keywords and phrases.

Read Also: What Your Favorite Social Network Sites Say About You

4. Filter Your Images

That entire thing about a picture being a thousand words, well, it’s true. With Facebook becoming a daily social outlet to connect with friends and family, you know unappealing photos will turn up eventually.

They’re generally harmless, but there are some photos of your wilder days in college that need not ever grace the light of day. If they do not represent who you are today, they may ruin your chances of landing a job in your dream company.

Filter your Tagged Photos too

Your safest bet is to go through the photos in your account and sift through the more private photos. You’d also want to spread out your net to humiliating photos friends put up on their Facebook wall. There is the option to require authorization from you first before these photos will turn up in your account. To do that and control other forms of unwanted tagging, check out How to Control Unwanted Tagging of Facebook Photos.

5. Integrate Your Social Network Profiles

How are you with names on the Web? It’s time to make sure that your name is consistent across all of them. Some of us may choose to use some nickname for our Facebook account while have our official name reserved for more professional uses. Then there’s a case of including the middle name, dialect names, Christian names to different profiles.

If you want to facilitate a recruiter’s search for you, standardize the name through all your profiles. Try not to use a nickname because it may seem less professional and less relatable to your actual name.

Keep It All Together

Apart from your name, check if the details you have put in your various profiles about your accomplishments, prior experience, employments, interests and even photos are pretty similar as well. Once you’ve done that, link all your social networks together.

One great way to do that is to create profile badges (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) for all your social profiles and promote them on your website. Your blog or website will become the hub for all prospective employers to glimpse at your personal and professional networks and get a feel of you as a potential employee.

6. Update Your Profile Regularly

Of course, it will be pretty pointless if you have all those badges for people to connect with you but do not have your most updated information in those profiles. It is of utmost benefit to you if recruiters can easily see your most recent job descriptions, achievements and other life changes to accurately assess your capabilities.

Failing to provide the most current content on your profiles may signal to them that you’re not interested enough to be headhunted. When you do update your profile, make sure that you do so for all other social networks so that you don’t frustrate recruiters with inconsistent updates.

Read Also: Social Networks: How To Keep Up Like A Pro

7. Express Yourself Across Different Platforms Regularly

If you want to maintain that online presence, you will need to be proactive in all your social networking platforms and your own website. Your goal is to showcase yourself to potential employers with your viewpoints and expertise so that they can judge you in a positive light.

Don’t just stop at blogging for your site or commenting and posting on your social network account, participate in public online forums, commenting on other blogs and even submitting reviews on books, movies, travels, etc. All these online footprints you leave out there establish your online reputation and validate the claims you make in your bio and resume.

Sharing is Caring

The beauty of online social networking lies in its seamless ability for people to share with just one or two mouse clicks. The lifespans of most articles or posts today are prolonged when they get shared across networks.

Hence, you can be assured that your efforts in blogging, commenting, posting and such can multiply your online presence in volumes when your contributions get shared. Just make sure that they are spread around for its quality content and not for the wrong reasons.

Here are three sharing utilities you can embed within your website to promote yourself: Share This, Lockerz Share and Add This.

8. Share Your Work Online

When you want to impress potential employers, one thing you have to do is to showcase your work online. This is especially so if you’re in the creative industry. You can do that by making use of a couple of well-known online communities and photo-sharing networks such as DeviantArt, Behance, Flickr and Instagram to promote your artwork and other designs.

Due to the abundance of designers and artists in such specialized communities and networks, such sites provide a conducive environment for contributions and commentaries. There is often a wealth of knowledge to tap into and plenty of opportunities to forge a positive reputation for yourself.

Your Portfolio, Your Shrine

Even if you’re not from the creative industry, you can still launch and build up your portfolio online. Showcase your past accomplishments on your website, from published research papers, company projects, samples of your best work, presentations and speeches, to volunteering services, accolades and certifications.

Putting these up online allows recruiter to have a clearer picture of your competence than what your brief and concise resume may reveal. Remember to place convenient attachments and links to your showcases on your website.

9. Balance Your Posts & Updates

Much as you want to get prospective employers noticing you online, you shouldn’t restrict your posts and updates to just career materials. I’m sure you’d still want to have fun and connect with your friends on a personal level instead of just using SNS to get jobs.

The good news is you can; in fact having personal posts and updates unrelated to work produces a more holistic representation of you and make you appear more genuine. So go ahead, show pictures of your family and friends, tweet about your hobbies and rant about sports all you want!

Keep It Clean and Coherent

Wait a minute, you say, what about all your profanity-filled tweets? Ah, that’s definitely a no-no. True enough, there are certain posts which tend to deter recruiters, as this infographic by Online College shows. 61% of recruiters don’t wish to see profanity in posts.

Other taboos include poor grammar/spelling mistakes (54%), mentions of alcohol consumption (47%) and religious posts (26%). The rule of thumb is to err on the safe side by not posting anything you think might be controversial. At the very least, limit such posts to your friends and hide them from public viewing.

Read Also: 55 Interesting Social Media Infographics

10. Do a Check By Googling Yourself

The best way to assess your online presence is to run the test yourself and google your name from time to time. If you want to see how popular you are on search engines, check out how frequently your name surfaces in the search results and how high up in the list they appear.

A study from Optify has revealed that the top three spots in the first page of a Google search get as much as 58.4% of all clicks! To attain that, you need to make your online presence felt with ongoing engagements in online communities, discussion forums, social network sites and blogs.

More importantly though, find out whether there are any negative content or digital dirt that others might have written about you. These can include bad reviews, online flamings and articles that quoted you out of context and put you in the negative light. If there are any, your priority will be to deal with those first. Here are some ways you can resolve them.

Here’s the situation: the new update you have gotten for your favorite app keeps crashing the app, rendering it useless. You’ve made the issue known to the developer (by your countless app reviews) but they tell you they need two weeks (or more) to get a working version up. In the meantime, deleting the app and reinstalling it doesn’t help.

If using the app is real important for your work or for your sanity, you will need a quick solution.

Well we have one but it will only work if you backed up your iPhone before the update. We’re going to show you how to reinstall the app to its pre-update version. Remember that the previous version is no longer available on the app store.

Recommended Reading: How To Backup IPhone SMS To Your Computer

Quick Reminder

Here’s a quick reminder of how to back up your iOS apps before the update.

Connect your iOS device to your computer, right click on your device and select Transfer Purchases. What this does is back up the current version of your apps to your computer.

In the event that you update an app that keeps crashing your device, you can still revert to the old version that has been backed up into your computer.

Restoring Older Version iOS Apps

If you haven’t deleted the faulty app, delete that annoying bug-ridden sucker on your iOS device. Then connect your device to iTunes and drag the backed up app from iTunes into your device. After that, click "Sync" button.

Alternatively, if you desperately need that app then you can ask someone who has made a backup to email you the app file.

Phone A Friend

The person can do this by right clicking on the app on iTunes and then selecting Show in Windows Explorer or Show in Finder for Mac.

There will be an .ipa format file. This file can then be used to install the older version app, just download it and drag it into your iOS device.

We hope this gives you another reason to practice frequent backups of the apps in your iOS devices. Lastly, before you download the ‘fixed’ update or another new app update, remember to back up your apps.

Whether it is for writing PHP, CSS, HTML or other languages, we all want to have to use only one, simple-to-use editor which looks great and have good features to boot. If this is what you are looking for you may find it in Brackets.

Brackets is a free and open-source editor built with HTML,CSS and Javascript. You may notice that it is also built using Twitter Bootstrap, which gives a great-looking and powerful framework to a pretty good editor. So far, it is available for download only for Windows and Mac systems.

Here are just some of the features you can find in Brackets.

Recommended Reading: Top 10 Free Source Code Editors

Sidebar Menu

Brackets comes with a handy-dandy vertical sidebar navigation menu that can be used to navigate between previously opened files quickly. Using this menu, you can also open up a folder and display each and every code- or text-related file in that folder.

Live Preview

Brackets hooks up directly to the browser allowing you to preview the files you are editing. My favorite part of live preview is that it even supports the previewing of PHP files! The live preview can be used by clicking on the lightning bolt in the top right hand corner of the editor.

Quick Open

Yet another great feature of the Brackets editor is the quick open tool. This is easily accessible by heading to Navigation > Quick Open in the top menu. Quick Open allows you to open up a file in the editor just by typing the filename, skipping the regular dialog pop up.

Quick Edit

The ‘Quick Edit’ feature is another one of my favorite features. It allows you to edit CSS elements quick and easy while editing your HTML element related to that particular CSS element.

For instance, if I were editing a small paragraph on an HTML page and wanted to edit the CSS background for that paragraph, I can use quick edit to change the color of the background.

Open Source

Another one of Bracket’s great and useful traits is that the editor is completely open source. Meaning, that anyone can add to the code and contribute to it. The developers have written out a complete guide to "hacking" and adding to the Brackets Editor. You can even create and download extensions for the editor.

Conclusion

Brackets is an amazingly useful and feature-packed editor, play with it to find more features that can suit your needs. However, note that it still can be a bit buggy at times as it is still in active development.