Accessing the Function of Emotion in Appreciated User Experience Design

Abstract

During recent years research in new design development (included product design, services design, etc.) has tried to understand how humans experience the artificial world. The research field which investigating human lived experiences of design is known as user experience. It focused on the interactions between people and the design that occur in a particular place and time, and how the interactions provide living qualities associated with the emotional and affective levels of a person such as pleasant, fears, joy, etc. The literature on user experience has constantly investigated new theories. However, these theories were piecemeal and they failed to provide a clear and comprehensive overview of the most influential aspects of user experience. This caused the situation that some concepts may be overlooked and relevant features may be absent from a general perspective. This study investigated how the experiences resulted from the human-design interaction, which is the foundation to explore the methods to optimise the design process and tools to support designers. The literatures of user experience were reviewed to understand the process of how user using and experiencing outstanding designs. The pragmatic characters of the design and the corresponding significant experiences in the human-design interaction were identified. Empirical studies then were adopted to find out how the experience provided by awarded designs and how the role of emotion in these experience. Based on the understanding of experience obtained from the studies above, the study then presented an evaluative research. Eight-category emotion system from psychologist studies was adopted as the measurement for users and designs to rank. This resulted the understanding on what emotions they prefer to experience and how their emotion were elicited through the designs. Thus, a design tool to support designers in the elicitation of experiences was proposed. The tools encourage create experience through emotions under the prediction of designers. This study is the preliminary study to connect existed knowledge and provide the overview of user experience. It provides a general understanding on the role of emotion in user experience for design research field. This study also suggested an optimised design tool for designer from the perspective of user experience.