Specification of Affective User Experience in Product Design

Abstract

This contribution reviews approaches and methods for developing product design specifications that place emphasis and priority on affective user experience. Understanding customers’ affective needs is difficult to grasp. For example, if a person wants an impression of luxuriousness, then it is necessary to investigate which product design attributes make the individual sense such an impression. To answer this question, the relationship between affective features and product design attributes should be analyzed, considering an interactive, evolving, and individual perspective. Pleasure with products, Kansei engineering, product emotion, Fuben-eki and product personalities are the approaches reviewed to illustrate the existing resources for specification of affective user experience in design. The notion of a product's ecosystem as part of the design of the user experience is related to experience prototyping. With the aim of providing guidance to designers, this contribution discusses whether the affective user experience specification methods translate directly into product design features, or if these are attained by trial and error, the latter being mostly the case, except for Fuben-eki. An expanding vision of futurism and evolution, based on projected future technological capabilities, may be associated to gradually enriching affective user experiences, increasingly demanding users and enlarging and more pervasive product ecosystems.

Keywords: Pleasure with Products, Fuben-eki, Kansei Engineering, Product Personalities, Product Ecosystem

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100565