Human-Product Communication - Emotional Engineering - page 21

Touching enables real time communication with the outer world, while other
senses cannot. Thus, a good feeling of touch implies that we can communicate with
the product directly in real time. The feeling that we can communicate better with
the product enhances product value. This is nothing other than emotional value.
Thus, touching is more often than not more important than vision or sound,
because customers can directly communicate with the product. Thus, touching is
very important for marketing.
In the same sense, touching is important in other products such as clothes. If we
feel that they ! fit us well, then we will evaluate them very highly. This is because we
can communicate with the product better. We have to remember that communi-
cation between products and users start after products are put into use.

13 User Experience

User Experience (UX) is getting wide attention these days. But most of them do not
discuss the issue of operations or use. Experience is gained through interaction or it
would be better to call it communication between the product and the user. So it is
the problem of how a user uses a product. But UX is discussed more loosely and
such research focusing on the issue of operations which vary from person to person
is not explored yet, or if there are any, very few.
If we can successfully categorize them in terms of the motivation-action-emotion
cycle, then, we could drastically reduce the number of variety of products and we
could design and produce mechanical products (in the broad sense as discussed
above) which would

! fit our customers far better and give them the highest

satisfaction.

14 Ful ! llment

Customer satisfaction and diversi ! cation are hot words today. But when products
were dif ! cult to get, people are satis ! ed if the products they want are produced and
delivered. But today what our customers want is mental ful ! llment, rather than
simple satisfaction that they receive the product. Satisfaction conveys an impression
of one time event. But ful ! llment is more associated with time.
As discussed in Chap. “ Age of Subjective Engineering ”, Expectation Satisfac-
tion is an issue over time and it is different from one time satisfaction. And feeling
of ful ! llment is associated with Expectation Satisfaction. The current customer
satisfaction considers only short term one, while ful ! llment is long term.
Customers' expectations are ful ! lled when our products serve them as they
expect or as they wish. Thus, ful ! llment is more related with the issue of operations
or use. UX is getting wide attention because it is considered to add value to