Create Motivation in Design?
A design without motivation is dull and boring, unclear and not informative. While I still struggling to figure out how to incorporate design and motivation, there are a few things that are very obvious: posters (graphic design) are designed to attract people, smartphones (industrial design) are made to enhance user experience of everyday life, movies (film making) are created to convey message or to show concern towards social illness (just like the movie 3 idiots). Those are the few examples that I only can think now, and one single video I've watched last night inspired me to write this post.
This is one old game that I've played since I was still a little kid. The game is called Megaman (X series is the one is fancy the most) and throughout the game there is one cool man-in-red called Zero as displayed on thumbnail.
As explained in the video, first few episodes of Megaman X series had brilliantly used this support character (Zero) as a motivation for us to complete the storyline of the game. However, the relationship between the main character X and side character Zero is neither a Vin Diesel/The Rock relationship in Fast and Furious, nor Batman/Joker relationship in ... Batman movies. Zero is just a fancy powerful idol character which made us (me) who played as X felt like a fan of Zero.
Ah...I know how to explain the game in real life. Just imagine you are a friend of the next door rich neighbour who you are too shy to greet him every morning but he still appears to lend you a hand when you are in financial crisis. Jeees, what a metaphor!
What I think about motivation...
Different game have different story design and motivation. Pokemon game would want you to collect all pokemons and Mario would require you to play the character to save a princess. This makes me think what are the existing motivations that I can find in my design field?
Motivation in graphic design works more like a persuasion, e.g.: you persuade someone to subscribe to your newsletter by designing good landing page with Call-To-Action buttons. Motivation revolves around cognitive psychology and good user experience research.
WATCH: The Fundamentals of User Experience(Few good design examples which you can relate starting 29:00)
Motivation also helps us to decide what to do when we encounter something. The most cliche example would be the pull bar installed on door explained by Vox. It's really easy to assume it's a pull-thing if there a pull/push bar located on the door.
Conclusion
It's very interesting to discover new element in creating effective design. Motivation should be designed carefully to guide users throughout anything, let it be a storyline in film making or a button on a website. After all, we are born to fulfil our nature of curious. While I could not possibly provide you scientific graphs, here are a few articles I would like to share!
