Modeling the role of empathic design engaged personas: An emotional design approach

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. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.