This is a brilliant book, written in a lively, engaging style that gets to the essence of experience design. This book should be required reading for designers: experience designers, human-computer interaction designers, user-interface designers, graphical designers, and industrial designers. It moves us beyond the basics and fundamentals toward the higher levels of human values and needs. The examples demonstrate how the ideas can be applied. Who should read it? All technologists and all psychologists who wonder how science can contribute to design. All engineers, who wonder what that soft, mush concept called "experience" has got to do with the products they build.
Marc Hassenzahl is Professor of "User Experience and Ergonomics" at Folkwang University in Essen, Germany. What a delightful title for a professorship! But then again, the book is delightful, full of deep psychological theory and insight, but written in such a way that you don't notice it unless you wish to.
(Marc criticizes my book, The Design of Everyday Things, for focussing on the low-level details of interaction rather than the more important higher levels of experience. I agree. What's the remedy? Read Hassenzahl. (Of course what I really want is: First read my book (the new, revised edition), then read Marc's.)
Read the book.
Hassenzahl, M. (2010). Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons. San Rafael, California: Morgan & Claypool.
Link to book at Amazon.com: Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons