Emotional Design vs Design of Everyday Things

I found Emotional Design much more interesting than Design of Everyday Things. Emotional Design's focus on aesthetics was a much more novel study. I think Design of Everyday Things focused too much on models to explain why designs were good or bad and how people think. Emotional Design opens with the results of scientific studies and continues to rely on research. Models are nothing more than conjecture without evidence and research. As a psychologist, I enjoyed Norman's analysis of cognitive processing, and breaking it into visceral, reflective, and behavioral components was a novel approach. The application of his processing model to creativity, affect, and the effects of aesthetics was more valuable to me than the generalities proposed in Design of Everyday Things. I think that in many cases, although perhaps not corporate-aimed products, the perception of ease and efficiency is more important to users than hard facts. A users gut feeling about their experience with a device does more to keep them coming back than efficiency measures could. I think this is evident in Apple's popularity and design principles. Apple designs products to be aesthetically pleasing and as simple as possible, but at the cost of hampering power users. Despite this, Apple's products are wildly popular, because most people aren't power users.