BlueHair: Interaction & Product Design

Tag: Evaluating emotions

  • My ServiceFellow – The real world version of Emoments!

    As it usually happens, great ideas are never truly unique. Our whole history of inventions and development rests in the shoulders of giants. The real trick lies in taking ideas to the next level and making them become a reality. And this is exactly what I just came across.

    While working on eMoments, the mobile app concept I developed as part of my MSc. graduation project I came in contact with Marc Stickdorn, from the Management Center Innsbruk and co-author of the great book “This is Service Design Thinking”. Marc did a great job in helping me understand what services and service design in particular was all about.

    Unfortunately for me, the eMoments project remained in a concept phase, but as it turns out, Marc was working in parallel on a very similar application to what I had in mind. An application that has gone through a lengthy design and testing process (which I want to believe was also influenced by my own project somehow 🙂 ) and which is now almost ready to be released into the wild.

    The result? My ServiceFellow! (more…)

  • Design for Interaction (and the afterlife)

    A few days back, I was invited to give a short presentation at the TU Delft to the new first year students of the Design for Interaction (DfI) master of science. Apparently being a DfI alumnus working at the biggest dutch industrial design studio made me an interesting profile to talk to Delft’s future interaction designers… or maybe I was the only one who accepted to come 😉

    I was asked to talk a bit about my experience during the master, especially during my graduation project and how it’s been so far as an interaction designer “in the wild”.

    To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have much time to practice it very well, but anyway since the faculty recorded the presentation I figured “why not publish it?”. So here it is…

  • 5 principles of service design thinking

    I’ve been in contact with Marc Stickdorn ever since my MSc. graduation project, as he is an expert in service design. Well he is now working on a new book project along with some of his colleagues in which they will deal with basics, tools and service design cases.

    The interesting part of it is that the project is getting the service design community involved as co-authors of the book so to speak, and as such the book is meant to be a reflection of what “the scene” thinks.

    In order to get some feedback on the first sneak preview of a few pages from the introduction of the book called “5 principles of service design thinking“,  we at SusaGroup worked together with Marc and his colleagues in arranging a special Panoremo setup which could be used by service designers to give their feedback on the content and the layout of the upcoming book’s sneak preview pages.

    If service design thinking is your thing, I suggest you drop by at www.susagroup.com/marcstickdorn to give Marc your own feedback. (more…)

  • Differentiating emotional hotel experiences (EuroCHRIE 2009)

    EuroCHRIE 2009I’m finally back home after attending the EuroCHRIE 2009 conference in Helsinki for a few days, and I have to say that it was quite an interesting experience for me, since it was not really in my professional field as a designer, but it did have to do with what I’ve been working on for the past few months first as part of my MSc. graduation project and now as an interaction designer/researcher for SusaGroup.

    The conference dealt with experiences in the hospitality and tourism industry and I was actually there presenting a working paper which came from a small exploratory study I conducted at the early stages of my graduation project with the aim to identify what type of emotions people felt the most in a hotel environment and towards what exactly. (more…)

  • Panoremo: A tool to assess the emotional experience of environments

    Panoremo_thumb

    Relevant Keywords:

    Evaluating emotions, environments, services, consumer experience, online application, prototyping

    Design Goal:

    During my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project a concept was developed that was deemed very interesting and promising for the potential assessment of emotions experienced towards a physical environment. This concept was later developed even further in collaboration with SusaGroup in order to bring it into the market as a fully functional instrument that can aid in emotional design research.

    Methods Used:

    • Early prototyping to perform user testing of working principle.
    • Software development.
    • Usability testing.

    (more…)

  • emoments: Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services

    emoments_thumb

    Relevant Keywords:

    MSc. Graduation project, evaluating emotions, services, consumer experience, hotels, mobile application, prototyping

    Design Goal:

    Various methods are available for measuring emotional responses elicited by products (design) or human-product interaction. Up to this point however, no instrument was available that could be used to assess emotional service experiences. The aim of the project was to extend the possibilities of assessing emotions to the realm of experiential service design. As a case study for the project, the focus was laid on the `hotel experience’, that is, the experience of a guest while staying at a hotel.

    Project duration:

    5 months (full time)

    Methods Used:

    • Thorough literature research to become acquainted with the project domain.
    • Online survey to identify the most common types of emotions experienced by hotel guests and the stimuli associated with these experiences.
    • Creative session organized with a panel of users and designers to generate ideas.
    • Early prototyping to perform user testing of concepts.
    • Creation of wire-frames and navigation flow-charts to define the software’s architecture.
    • Hi-Fi prototyping of final concept.
    • Usability testing.

    (more…)

  • Measuring and evaluating emotions towards physical spaces

    emotional_space1Well, it’s kind’a cool at the deep end of the pool. Two months into my current status as a Master of Science I’m having lots of fun working on a temporary basis (let’s hope that changes soon) with the good people at Susa Group, the company that I worked for during my graduation project.

    And it’s lots of fun because I’m doing something which I really enjoy, and we are working on transforming one of the concepts I developed during graduation into a fully working and marketable tool which hopefully people will be using in a very, very near future.

    It’s still a work in progress, but the idea is to develop a tool that can help in measuring and evaluating emotions towards  physical spaces. This opens up the door to a plethora of possibilities and applications: evaluating an urban environment to know how people feel about their surroundings (emotions in architecture and urbanism), finding out how people feel about that new interior design that you are developing for a new store (emotions in retail design) or identifying the critical emotional points of a restaurant or of a hotel lobby (emotions in experiential services) are but a few of the examples I can think of. (more…)

  • Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services – MSc. graduation presentation (Video & Pics)

    [iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/12315079?byline=0″ width=”630″ height=”394″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen]

    So… it’s been a little over a week since I did the presentation for my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project (Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services), and since I went off on a short one week vacation right after that, I didn’t have the time to post the video and some photos of the presentation during that time.

    But as I promised some people, today I finally got back and had some spare time to upload everything. So above,you can take a look at the video of the presentation (takes about 45 minutes including the questions round). The file is quite big (around 500 Mb) because I couldn’t (more…)

  • PrEmo: a tool to measure emotional responses

    PrEmo is a tool to measure emotional responses towards products, originally developed by Pieter Desmet at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft. It uses animated characters to portray a certain number of emotions, which a person can use to describe in a non verbal way the kind of emotions that he feels towards a product.

    I had the chance to work in a research project in the past in which I compared this tool to a more semantic tool (the Geneva Emotions Wheel) which gave us some very good insights into how this tool could be enhanced. Together with Pieter Desmet, it was decided that a follow up project was needed in order to make a newer version of the tool with the findings of the first study as a basis.

    I you are interested in helping out with this study, please visit www.bluehaired.com/premo and fillin our questionnaire. Here you willbe able to see the evolution of the original tool and give us some feedback about it.

    And of course, if you are interested in the results or the study in general, you can always drop me a line and I’ll be happy to give you more information.