9 A Hands-On Design Workout
This chapter covers
- Honing your skills through design analysis and improvement
- Material for self-practice
We’ve made it to the top of the mountain together! Now, you’ve got all the essential laws, principles, and techniques from various branches of psychology to create emotional designs that truly connect with your audience.
But I can guess what you're thinking right now. You’re probably going, “Okay, this is awesome, but it's a lot! How am I supposed to remember everything and actually use it in my work?”
That’s where practice comes in! In this chapter, we're going to go through an exercise that’s designed to sharpen your design instincts and give you that super-vision every designer dreams of.
This exercise is also the key to developing the emotional intelligence needed to create products that people really connect with. By studying real digital products through the lens of design laws and psychological principles, you'll memorize the theory and also train yourself to recognize which elements elicit emotional responses and why. Over time, this awareness helps you intentionally design experiences that reduce frustration, build trust, create joy, and foster habits—all emotional outcomes that make products memorable and meaningful to users. By regularly practicing this type of analysis, you'll strengthen your ability to put empathy into action and make emotional engagement a natural part of your design process.