human behavior

Our project, I feel, is still a bit fussy, but we’re narrowing down the field of emotive / emotional response; testing on our own research so far.

At the moment we’re looking for methodology that people are familiar with and that could provide some insight.

My aim is to find underlying dimensions of product experience from the user’s perspective rather than the user experience designer’s perspective. I think it is important to understand the complexity of emotional response as to the ability to have a positive effect on decision-making in interactions and I would like to do a bit more research into this, regarding trust/distrust and daily transactions. However there are problems: The user’s specific emotional response to a design may vary over time, based on if they are having a good day, if they are having any disagreements with their loved ones, and so on.  All of these things are external and can impact the emotional measurement that we capture from the user.  (Hence the macroscopic emotional response to a product is a very difficult thing to capture and leverage as design input.)

As for now we’re considering the structure of the user’s emotional response and Alice and I would like to use that to drive some of our data collection. So far, from our workshops and readings, we’ve found that novelty generates arousal in our emotional system and the valence of that emotion is dictated by how quickly our brains can come to terms with the novel stimulus.  -If we see something new and it immediately makes sense to us, we have a positive emotional experience, but if we see something novel and have trouble understanding it, then we have a negative emotional experience.  

-The key then is evaluating how easily users can make sense of a novel design. 

The winding path forward: 

1. Use the semantic differential to determine which designs have a similar semantic profile. /

2. Use clustering and grouping exercises to determine the relationship between a new product and existing products within a service.

3. From this extract data that gives a positive or negative emotional response to interfaces / designs, as well as to have some information about how to adapt the design to “improve” the emotional response.