A Desirability Design Process Diagram
Aesthetics is a greatly misapplied term in product development, often adopted simply to mean ‘styling’. The term, however, is derived from the Greek word ‘aisthetikos’, meaning ‘perceptible by the senses’, and in a design context should refer to the whole range of ways in which we use and interact with products. As the technology in a product group reaches a point of sufficiency, the success of one product over another becomes dependent on the user’s subjective experience.
—Measuring Aesthetics
Desirability design provides a set of techniques for affect–based design. Of designing product interaction to align with and be accessible to user desires and perceptions. One of the objections to desirability and affect design is you can’t design an emotion. No technical person would argue against aerodynamics on the basis you can’t engineer air. And desirability is no more about designing emotions than aerodynamic engineering is about engineering air.
The design tasks are aesthetics, benefits and symbols. Each can be represented by anything from style and user interface guidelines to business identity designs. The objective is emotional usability; and many products and sites have a disturbingly high emotional drag coefficient.
Emotional Desirability : Aesthetics :: Look and Form
Whichbook affective controls
Aesthetics, the sensual aspect of design, can not be measured in the same way you might measure engine torque. Some consider this to mean aesthetic measurement is impossible. Yet aesthetics are measured and acted on every day; in contests, in the marketplace, in style choices which make for classifiable market segments and fashion trends. On the web, whichbook.net offers mood based interface controls for selecting books by desire profile. Affective usability is crucial for interfaces supporting buying decisions, where emotion has long been known to play an important part.
Functional Desirability : Benefits :: Interaction and Behavior
A company’s real relationship with a customer is not communicated through the marketing, however compelling it may be. It is communicated through the cup holders in the doors, the easy–to–read LED display in the cell phone cover, the user–friendly menu on the digital video recorder, or the leak–proof absorbency of the baby diaper.
— Douglas Rushkoff; Get Back In The Box, p158
Benefits are the user experience of product functions. Developers experience the product inside–out, features and individual components. Often how the functions are constructed limits design options; construction effectively dictates the design. The customer forms their conclusions from the the outside. Only with time do individual features matter, and very often how features work together has more customer desirability. Too many companies use buzzwords like “scalability” or “ease of use” as polite nicety. If all the scalable software does is fail to crash under some added load, you have a prerequisite — not a benefit.
Desirability Design Process Diagram
Identity Desirability : Symbols :: Positioning and Archetypes
Symbols are the way that the meaning system and the community communicates with each other. So when you see the Apple logo or the Saturn logo or the JetBlue logo, you know that that stands for certain values with which you identify. …Symbols are the way that we exchange allegiances with each other. You must have a system of symbology.
— frontline: the persuaders: interviews: douglas atkin
A paper titled Exploring Identity Salience and Purchase Intent describes research done by Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed II. Simply put, Reed’s research uncovered identity as what turns brand recognition into bankable brand preference.
A customer may choose certain brands to support a work persona, but very different brands when entertaining or out with friends. By discovering social identification archetypes users are trying to support, you see strategic gaps and design flaws causing brand dissonance. Product design which fails to symbolize is merely styling …the sports car with underpowered engine. Or gorgeously designed nonprofit website layouts that send the wrong message about how the organization spends money.
Make no mistake, putting a logo on a design and developing a campaign after construction does not mean branding through design.
While most designers throw around the term “user experience” practically none have a roadmap for user experience design. Now you have more information about the practical design requirements than most user experience designers.
The desirability design process creates a motivation profile for the aesthetics, symbols and benefits meaningful to a user experience. “The market” doesn’t interact with, evaluate, get frustrated by or fall in love with a product, each individual does.
Resources
- Building Strong Brands By David A. Aaker “A brand personality can make a brand more interesting and memorable and can even become a vehicle to express a customer’s identity.” The article Exploring the Links between Brand Name and Consumer Identity adds “Moreover, the goal is to help the consumer fortify that identity, as well as communicate that identity to others.” Bruce Nussbaum explains “Today, enabling people to create their own identities may be the Next Big Thing in design and innovation.”
- Brand awareness does not mean brand preference. “With the dotcom fallout, companies are relearning the basic lessons of what makes a successful brand—mainly, that you can’t live on image alone. Eyeballs don’t equal sales, and logos don’t create loyalty. Consumers want to know what you’re all about and why they should trust you enough to purchase your product.” Wake up! Your brand isn’t your savior, and all the goofy ads in the world won’t save your company. What can? Well…have you given good business a try? Entrepreneur magazine; September 2001 By Chris Penttila
- Sensuality in Product Design: a Structured Approach explains the branding through design approach, a structured way of designing products with sensual aspects and testing user response.
- information aesthetics; form follows data – data visualization & visual culture
- An introduction to user journeys associates the marketing need state and designer personas into a user journey.
- frontline: the persuaders: interviews: douglas atkin “Now a brand manager has an entirely different kind of responsibility. …Their job now is to create a whole system of symbols in their brand for every single touch point for the brand that reflects back that meaning that kind of engenders that community.”
- Emotion as a Cognitive Artifact and the Design Implications for Products That are Perceived As Pleasurable “Emotion acts as a cognitive artifact in task achievement and is central to how other artifacts are interpreted and how pleasure is perceived. Emotion also plays a valuable role in sense–making (Rafaeli and Vilnai–Yavetz, 2003) and impacts how users interpret, explore and appraise a user interface. Artifacts that embody affective properties can be viewed as affective artifacts and therefore captured as valuable design criteria.”
- Emotion and Design F.A.Q. — Building a Product That Works and Connects With Users By Art Swanson and Ross Teague. Argues for emotional usability, rather than designing emotions. Brand UX “So where does branding fit with user experience, with interaction design, with human–computer interaction?”
- “By understanding the job and improving the product’s social, functional, and emotional dimensions so that it did the job better …Marketers who are stuck in the mental trap that equates market size with product categories don’t understand whom they are competing against from the customer’s point of view.” What Customers Want from Your Products by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall
- Emotional Mapping is a design process that uncovers feelings and attitudes towards products. It gathers information on why people prefer one product over the other. It identifies key attributes, tangible and intangible, overt and subtle, conscious and subconscious, that help connect products and people.
- Apple doesn’t just slap on a logo and tagline after constructing a product, they brand through design. Product design either embodies a meaningful promise or it becomes incidental. NussbasumOnDesign takes Apple to task for neglecting Lauderback’s Law of multiple contexts.
- The Dove “real” campaign makes an actual design choice of aesthetic; far different from choosing amongst rail–thin models. Nontraditional models are only one part of a shrewd use of an aesthetic as strategic direction and competitive advantage.
- “Technological development does not solely equate to the development of photo–realism. …Theoretically games could host a period of aesthetic experimentation comparable, at least in visual diversity, to the artistic movements of the last century.” Videogame Aesthetics: We’re All Going to Die! by David Hayward
- The study of neuroeconomics may topple the notion of rational decision–making, BusinessWeek. “Neuroeconomics also challenges the notion that emotions can only corrupt economic decision–making. Indeed, emotions grab people’s attention and motivate them to focus their rational brains on the issue at hand, says Antonio R. Damasio, a University of Iowa College of Medicine neurologist”
- Brand Autopsy on Rushkoff’s Get Back In The Box and branding through emotional design.
- PDF ‘This Is Not a Game’ Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play by Jane McGonigal Department of Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies; University of California at Berkeley. How the blurring of the lines between digital and real results in immersive aesthetics, or augmented reality. And how collaborative play techniques can instruct real–world problem–solving. How ‘Lost’ reinvented television explains the use of Alternative Reality Gaming (ARGs) as a storytelling enhancement.
- The Influence of Computer Interface Aesthetics on Positive Affect provides some answers about user experience design. Consider interaction guru Tog’s recent experience with the Lexus self–destruct switch. Companies and designers know exactly how to design a customer experience for negative emotional reactions.
- “Backed by Gallup case studies and extensive Gallup research, McEwen and Fleming concluded in their GMJ article “Customer Satisfaction Doesn’t Count” that companies chasing the coveted prize of high customer satisfaction are “pursuing the wrong goal. That’s right. Regardless of how high a company’s satisfaction levels may appear to be, satisfying customers without creating an emotional connection with them has no real value. None at all.” —Customer Satisfaction Is the Wrong Measure
- Game designers long ago discovered desirability depends on making things easy to start but difficult to master. So yes, increasing usability can decrease desirability.
- THE EXPERIENCE OF DESIGN (PDF) “As argued elsewhere (Desmet, Hekkert, & Jacobs, 2000), available emotion measurement instruments are not appropriate to measure such an emotion spectrum that is regarded as highly informative. Therefore, a new instrument was developed, based on a set of emotions that can be specifically elicited by a products’ appearance. Through a series of studies, the emotions were identified as the ones that occur most frequently in response to a products’ appearance. The instrumentis called PrEmo and is designed to measure mixed product emotions in a fast and intuitive way.”
- The article Carly’s Way describes a schism between business and technology which forms the imagination gap. “Either technology is ahead of business strategy thinking, or business strategy thinking is being limited by the inability and fear of corporate IT to deliver on the promises of technology.”
- Herman, Dan, The Making or Faking of Emotionally Significant Brands (June 2003) explains why many brands lack emotional significance. Brain, Metaphor, Archetype, Brand is one of the more thoughtful articles with relevance to brand interaction, product design and brand dissonance.
- The Design and Emotion web site covers terms like affective usability. Designing for Affective Interactions show you how.
- “Not only technical and objective demands are important, but also aesthetic, emotional, and other experiential factors, some of which are hard or impossible to express objectively. In design practice, the designer has to balance between objective and subjective properties, between functional technology and emotional expressiveness, between information and inspiration. … When a design approach uses Kansei engineering, we give our attention to the behaviors of people when they perceive images or objects including products, and study how their personal preferences or cultural bases work to their feelings. ‘Pleasure’ would be one of the major feelings from the impression occured by Kansei.” (PDF) Pleasure with Products: Design based on Kansei; SeungHee Lee Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.