Modeling the Role of Empathic Design Engaged Personas: An Emotional Design Approach (Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction) Part 1

Abstract

Norman suggested three dimensions of emotion to approach user-centred design to raise awareness of the importance of designing for users to achieve a higher level of satisfaction. In other words, the design should satisfy the user’s emotional desires beyond usability. This opinion explains user-centred design more broadly. Companies, such as Apple and Microsoft, have already employed anthropologist to observe users’ daily behaviour. Unfortunately, gathering information on users’ needs is costly, time consuming and complex and has, therefore, become a barrier for designers. Additionally, most emotional design only covers shape design instead of all emotional aspects. There is little previous work devoted to tackling these problems. This research, therefore, proposed using empathic design with the assistance of personas as the main approach to emotional design. We first investigated the designers’ current design pattern to explore the difficulties and problems. Next, personas were used to ascertain how they could help designers to engage in emotional design. Comparisons were then given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. This study invited 16 designers to partake in this assessment. We explored how personas help designers in idea generations by using emotional design and some guidelines were suggested for future research.

Keywords: User -Centred Design (UCD), personas, empathic design.

Introduction

Today, user-centred design (UCD) is widely regarded as the design philosophy that defines how a design should be made by understanding the user’s needs. In addition, the whole design process is examined iteratively to be user-centric by the guideline ISO 13407 to enhance the practice of UCD [1].

In the early years, the promotion of UCD was meant to solve the problems that had been encountered by some designs, those that were difficult to use and that frustrated users. Norman pointed out the guidelines for designers in his book, "The Design of Everyday Things", helping them to correctly design functions by considering the users [2]. However, he argued in his next book, "Emotional Design", that design should cover not only the cognitive parts but also human emotion. Therefore, he proposed three dimensions of emotion, visceral, behavioural and reflective, and suggested that designers should not neglect the role of the user’s emotions when designing [3]. In other words, design should be customised by taking both users’ cognition and emotion into account. Jordan also has similar viewpoints. He suggested the "four pleasures", which are physio-pleasure, socio-pleasure, psycho-pleasure and ideo-pleasure [4]. In addition, the satisfaction in function and usability is not enough to make users feel pleasure at a higher level of satisfaction. Jordan’s points also indicated that user-centred design could be more complete by the explanation of satisfaction in advance. Therefore, the design is not the argument of design by following "aesthetics" or "functionality"; the proportions of the design elements are subjective to users.

Nevertheless, UCD is now used more in large enterprises even though there are several approaches to achieving UCD, such as contextual design, participatory design and empathic design. The reason is because the involvement of users makes the design costly. Most designers have a problem in understanding users when faced with them since it needs a high level of skill to arbitrate the decisions among users in a meeting and a professional background to resolve the users’ behaviour during observations. Consequently, empathic design focuses on more aspects for the designers in the early stages of design. In addition, although empathic design offers "observation" as the method, the key point is to understand the users. Therefore, we only adapt the meaning "understanding of users" as the basis. To ask designers to think and behave like users could be a comparatively cheap solution as there is no "real user" involvement. Hence, the researchers suggested a method based on empathic thinking in order to help designers in the early stages of design to promote the benefits of cost effectiveness that are easy to manipulate.

This paper aims to explore the use of empathic design mixed with personas in order to help designers in the early stages of design to undertake emotional design more easily, enabling it to be more cost and time efficient. By doing this, we can persuade more usage of emotional design. 16 designers were invited to evaluate the proposed model by two-phase experiments and the experiment methods were interviews, think-aloud protocols and video recording. More findings are discussed in the results and discussion section. Through this research, we found this proposed method helped designers in emotional design and future suggestions were given.

User-Centered Design: User-centered design (UCD) is a design concept first mentioned by Donald Norman (1990). The definition of UCD is as its name implies, design according to users’ needs. Norman criticised many inadequate designs that surround us and highlighted how they discouraged users from using the products. The significant difference of UCD is that it aims to persuade designers that design should consider the users’ needs during the whole design process rather than adjusting users to accommodate the products. Even though more and more companies are aware of the advantages of UCD and believe UCD to be an important philosophy, the different properties of products mean that following UCD becomes a difficult task. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) provides a framework in ISO 13407. It suggests the human-centred design mechanism of the application and the evaluation. Although ISO 13407 offers a basic guideline for the interactive design process, it is not intended to specify the particular methods required to approach UCD. In addition, one of the major points in ISO13407 is the iterative structure of the design process, as shown in Figure 1. It clarifies how the design should consider the user during the whole process.

Emotional Design: In "Design for Everyday Things", Norman admitted that user-centred design defines design by considering the user’s wants. However, at that time he only considered that products"make sense". In other words, he only suggested the guidelines for cognitive thinking. Later, Norman proposed a supplement to this in his book "Emotional Design", which pointed out the important role played by human emotions when designing interactive products. The main points of emotional design are based on three levels of emotional processing: Visceral, Behavioural and Reflective. As we can see from Figure 2, using this model we can easily reflect design elements according to emotional behaviour. In other words, different users may reflect their different desires on different aspects of design elements, such as aesthetics, functionality and usability. This can explain the reasons why some products that are difficult to use are still loved by some customers, whereas those that look good are more attractive to certain users.

Fig. 1. The process of UCD and the area of this research

Fig. 2. The three-levels of human emotion reactions connected to the product characteristics.

Empathic Design: This is an approach to UCD where the designer attempts to get closer to the lives and experiences of users and to apply the knowledge from end-users during the design process [5]. The goal of empathic design is to ensure that the product or service is designed to meet the needs of the end-users and is usable. Nevertheless, the users are only indirectly involved in the design project. It therefore tends to become ‘designer-centred’ instead of UCD. Additionally, professionals in empathic design promote the use of observation, although sometimes it is difficult to have the chance to freely observe the users in a particular situation. In addition to this, the involvement of users requires the design to need more skills and costs. Consequently, in this research, "personas" are used to overcome these issues and enhance the use of empathic design.

Personas: After Alan Cooper first promoted personas in his book, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" [6], personas have been widely used in the computer science domain. Personas provide user profiles that can represent a group of people. The two main benefits of the use of personas are for communication between teams and to help designers to focus more on their users [7]. More findings, in terms of the use of personas, have been researched by Microsoft. In their work, they used personas to develop their popular software, such as "Office" and "Messenger", finding that the use of personas was a great benefit to design tasks. In addition, famous Japanese businesses are using them for organisation communication. The authors will use per-sonas as the key technique and, inheriting many of the advantages from work previous to this research, we intend to investigate how personas can help a designer to develop their product concept in their individual work. This research will analyse the aspects that the individual designer can use to connect with emotional design, especially few scholars contributed in the area that the process of the use of personas with emotional design.

Methods

By reviewing the literature we will propose methods for this assessment. There will be a two-phase assessment. First is to investigate the current design pattern of the participants. The second will be to apply the proposed model to observe how designers conduct the idea generation. We will then compare the differences before and after the use of the persona-method to reach the conclusions.

The Proposed Method: Empathic Design with Personas

We have arranged a two-phase experiment. In the first phase, we aim to survey designers’ current design patterns. During the second phase, we will conduct the proposed method and then make comparisons in order to further evaluate the effectiveness. The plan of the experiment is showed in Figure 3.16 designers participated in the assessments.

Fig. 3. The Illustration of the assessment plan

Even though this research can apply to various product categories, some control factors were defined in order to examine the comparable information in this assessment. Firstly, we assigned the same product in all the design tasks in which designers were asked to develop their product concepts. Additionally, the interviewees were required to have a similar background and to be able to manage the development of a design concept for a single product. Moreover, the designated task was confined to designing a product for use by an individual instead of a multi-user product. Also, the specified design task needed to cover all the elements of "appearance, function and usability". Each participant spent about 30 minutes undergoing interviews and the design tasks. A personal use product was specified to simplify the use of the personas. The design task needed to contain the appearance, function and usability in order to project the three emotional layers.

Phase I: The Investigation of the Current Design Pattern

During this phase, semi-structured interviews and think-aloud were undertaken in order to acquire details of the interviewee’s background.

Phase II: The Investigation of the Use of the Persona

The second phase is to introduce the personas in order to investigate how they can help with the design task. Before the task is examined, some assumptions are proposed: The designers are trained to have the design common sense to design and they are assumed to have the imagination for the operation of fictional characters. Otherwise, the participants and the target task remained the same as for the first phase. The persona should be developed from the anthropology survey, except for the name and the photo, according to the previous literature. This is to avoid stereotyping a persona from familiar names and photos. Additionally, for reasons of ethics, it is essential to protect any private and personal data. Therefore, this study licensed photos from the FERET database (Figure 4. left side). The names were chosen from the most popular UK names on the website. The profile of the persona was taken from a lady who was located in our target market segment. Due to the limited task time available, the authors only assigned one persona, as the illustration on the right side of Figure 4. shows. Task 2 took 10-15 minutes and the participants were asked to design, applying the same conditions as the first phase. The only difference was they needed to develop their concept using the specified persona provided. The persona is located within the same market segment, "25 to 34 year-old office ladies". The point of this research is the investigation of the interaction between designers and the personas and the creation of personas is another big process.

Results and Discussion

The General Background and the Context of Design from the Interview

Thirteen of the designers were from Asia, two of them were from the UK and one was from the US. As we can see from Table 1, industrial designers were interviewed in the first and second phases. Within the group there were eleven senior designers with more than five years of work experience. Five of the group were junior designers with between six months and up to five years experience. The final group member was a senior design student who had only run independent design projects and group projects.

However, six designers felt that they needed to study the market on their own before they designed. Consequently, to avoid unfairness in the experiment, the researchers confined the task. We provided the same product information and only asked them to develop their product concepts.

Furthermore, the designers were asked to describe their present methods of practising idea generation and their general design cycle for a project. Interestingly, when the question was asked, "Does the user matter in your design projects?", only six of them answered "Yes", whereas nine responded that they did specify users but tried to ensure the design covered all user groups in order to gain maximum benefits.

Fig. 4. The left side is example photos from the FERET database. The right side is the persona in this task.

Table 1. The background of the participants

Samples 1	Work Experiences Senior	Project Lifecycle2 1-3m	Idea generation methods Similar work gathering	Emotional design C
2	Junior	1-3m	Brainstorming/Similar work gathering/ Scenarios/sketch	C
3	Junior	<5m	Similar work gathering/Sketch	A
4	Senior	1-3m	Brainstorming /Similar work gathering	C
5	Senior	1-3m	Sketch/Discussion/Similar work gathering	C
6	Senior	1m	Sketch	C
7	Junior	1m	Sketch	C
8	Student	1-2w	Sketch /User data gathering	C
9	Senior	3-5d	Sketch/ Brainstorming /User data gathering/ Similar work gathering/Sports	A
10	Junior	1-3m	Sketch/ Brainstorming /User data gathering/ Similar work gathering	C
11	Senior	>6m	Sketch/ Brainstorming /User data gathering	C
12	Senior	1-2m	Sketch/ Brainstorming /User data gathering	C
13	Senior	2-3m	Sketch/ Brainstorming /User data gathering/ Similar work gathering	C
14	Senior	1-3m	Sketch/Brainstorming/User data gathering	C
15	Senior	1-4w	Sketch/Brainstorming/User data gathering	C
16	Senior	1-3m	Sketch	C

This demonstrated the current design problems that designers were usually asked to do design greedy cover the market. The final participant believed that users were not important in their design. We also asked them how much they understood emotional design. Surprisingly, only one of them showed an understanding. Most of them either said they had never heard of it or they had heard of it but they did not exactly understand the definition of emotional design. These patterns will be compared in the design task to see if the interview answers were identical to their design behaviour.

With regards to the design behaviour, several methods were used to inspire design ideas. Most of the designers tended to get the design concept by sketch, brainstorming and information gathering. Later, we gave them a design task that followed their current methods. Before doing this task, a question was asked in order to record whether they had designed a similar product before. Four of them had designed once for the same market segment and two of them had designed the same product. This information was taken in order to record whether their memory of the previous design affected and contributed towards any bias in the design process that we asked participants to do. We asked them to do the same task twice to compare how useful the personas were.