Hi Jason - I've done a fair amount of research into this problem and I think it is important to understand the complexity of emotional response. Overwhelmingly, discrete specific emotional response is transient and dependent on a number of external factors. In other words the user's specific emotional response to your design may vary over time based on if they are having a good day, how their drive over to the office was, if they are having any disagreements with their significant other, etc. All of these things are external and can impact the emotional measurement that you capture from the user. So the macroscopic emotional response to a product is a very difficult thing to capture and leverage as design input. You can, however consider the structure of the user's emotional response and use that to drive some data collection. There is an excellent book by Del Coates called "Watches tell more than time" that does an excellent job of setting a framework for understanding why people have emotional responses to products. The short story is 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 your novel design. You can use the semantic differential to determine which designs have a similar semantic profile, or you can use clustering and grouping exercises to determine the relationship between your new product and existing products in that space. And from that data you can infer a positive or negative emotional response to your design, as well as to have some information about how to adapt the design to "improve" the emotional response.
Again, this is an exceedingly complex problem, and this is an oversimplification of the problem, but hopefully it will give you some more ideas... --Art ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
