What are feelings, really? For me, feelings are very abstract, floating, slightly out of reach, difficult to describe with words and put into shape.
This last year has been tough, I've gone through a break up that I didn't want, but maybe I needed, and didn't understand. Unrelated, and also coincidentally, I'm working on improving me, getting to know my brain. It's difficult. I decided to get help from a professional brain person, to understand me and to start to unravel every little thing that makes me, me.
Okay, so you're making something. That's amazing! Making anything can be super terrifying, before you just start making. For me the start is the most difficult, what do I make? Do I make for myself or for someone else? What if I'm not happy, what if they're not happy? What feeling should what I make try to evoke?
I would start by trying to put into words what feelings you want the person using your thing to feel when they're using it. Using can be anything; viewing, touching, listening, drinking, eating, laying or sitting on or in, or playing. And more.
Oh and also, do you want them to feel your thing mostly in their heart or their brain? Or both?
Brain feel to me is what kicks in when something I use makes me think. For example a puzzle. I have to think, preferably the thing is designed to be difficult to understand, and not on a whim, that would be bad design.
You can adjust the level of thinking required too. From easy to learn, easy to master to hard to learn, hard to master. It's a grid. A thing can be easy to learn and hard to master, or hard to learn and easy to master. I guess you could ask what the difference between learn and master is, let's say using a knife. It's fairly simple to learn (cutting slowly and randomly) and hard to master (cutting quickly and precisely).
Brain feel is also when logic follows form and function. When all those click, it's very satisfying, it tickles the brain more than the heart.
When I design it's often more important for me to push for brain feel. For example if I'm making a puzzle, there's logical mechanisms involved, I'll go for more brain than heart. Puzzles feel more rewarding when the player has to think for a while. You can then put a lot of heart into being kind to the player with a thoughtful reward once they complete the puzzle!
Heart feel is when something just feels right. If it looks good to you, and you feel it in your heart that this is the way. That's my only guiding light for heart feel. Heart feel is difficult to get right, and it is a lot of feeling! You might need to go back and forth, sleep on your designs, then come back again and feel some more.
I find that heart feel often evolves with me as I design. At the start of a process, heart feel can say that this looks good, at the end, the design almost never look as it did at the start, even if heart feel said it looked good. I think heart feel changes a lot during the process because it might need consistency? When you go from 0 to 100 in a process, what you've learned often requires you to iterate to catch up and be consistent.
Perhaps there's a bit of brain feel in there too. I would say that heart feel is most difficult of the two to get right, but when you do, you can really feel that.
It's a good guiding principle to always be happy with the heart feel of what you make. Don't stop making until your heart feels right.
I think the best way to understand feelings, is to listen. If you make something for someone else, go out of your way to listen to and understand their feelings. Get them to say or show what they feel and think to get a better understanding.
