January 2017 - August 2017
Publication
Citation information
Qin S., Zhou Y. (2019) Emotional Crowdsourcing Tool Design for Product Development: A Case Study Using Local Crowds. In: Fukuda S. (eds) Advances in Affective and Pleasurable Design. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 774. Springer, Cham
Principles of Emotional Design. Source: Garron Engstrom
Project Background
I had the honor to work with professor Shengfeng Qin from Northumbria University Schools of Design (UK) on a case study of transferring Don Norman’s Emotional Design Principles into a crowdsourcing platform design at the UCSD Design Lab.
The study conducted user research, and processed through ideation, prototyping, and usability testing. I collaborated with Professor Qin and co-wrote of the research paper of this study.
The full length 12-page paper was published at AHFE 2018 conference.
Introduction
Design of everyday products previously and now are mainly focused on its usability. Professor Don Norman’s emotional design principles proposed on moving design beyond usability to fun and pleasure. Norman’s emotional design builds on three interconnected layers: visceral design, behavioral design and reflective design.
We believe that emotional design principle could be applied to a product and service design, and we chose crowdsourcing platform design as our case study, as crowdsourcing is a useful tool for new product development and business innovation.
How Do We Design for Emotions?
The challenge of designing for emotion is that emotion is generally defined in terms of subjective experiences or feelings. According to research, there’s a multi-layered model of emotions in product design that include surprise emotion (e.g. amazement), instructional emotion (e.g. disappointment), aesthetic emotion (e.g. disgust), social emotions (e.g. admiration) and interest emotions (e.g. fascination).
In this case study, we use local crowds in a co-design process. At ideation phase, the crowds acted as designers to conduct emotional design from a designer perspective, and at evaluation phrase, they act as users to conduct emotional design as users of the platform.
In order to transform emotional design principles into the emotional crowdsourcing tool design, making it useful, usable and pleasurable, we first prototype a suitable emotion/emotional design process, and then identify a set of emotions and corresponding design features applicable for a crowdsourcing platform design and gain better understanding of common key concerns affecting the users’ satisfaction of a platform. Finally, we identify a set of operational toolkits with emotional design features.
Goal & Purpose
We hope to integrate both designer and user driven perspective in the emotional design process, and the crowdsourcing platform design is a case study to demonstrate this process.
Research Contribution
Emotion consists of a huge part of user experience in product and service design, and therefore this project is a valuable research topic for both UX and HCI research fields.
Related Works
We conducted online research and found that related works in the field included:
- Gamification
- Pricing
- Incentives
- Notifications
- Engagement improvement
- Task recommendations
(Read full research paper to see details about related works)
Illustration of transferring emotional design principle to crowdsourcing platform design
How Do We Design Research Method?
Case Selection - We decide to convert the current UCSD Design Lab into a kitchen bar as a business proposition and outsourcing the kitchen layout design as a case study.
Participants As Crowd - We selected 25 undergraduate volunteers as participants from 150 research assistants registered on the Design Lab. We also recruited an interior designer and designer researcher to participate the workshops.
Co-creation - All workshop activity plans (includes activity briefing, brainstorming, group discussions, post-it, voting, prototyping and simulation) were published on Google Docs and available for all participants to co-creating and co-editing.
Use Project Stage-Gates Model as Guide - HITs-based crowdsourcing tool such as Amazon Mechanical Turk is not very popular in product design field because it lacks support for a design project development as a whole. Thus, in our research we used the project stage-gates model to guide our explorations with six stages: Discovery, Scoping, Business Case, Development, Test and Launch.
Simulation - We conducted two focus-group based simulation studies, and we produced a key list of functions/tools needed in a ranked order based on participant voting.
(Read full research paper to see more about experiment details and results)
Conclusion
This case study using Human-Centered Design and User Experience design process as guides to develop an integrated emotional design process. By simulating real design scenarios on a virtual crowdsourcing platform, the project identifies the key functions/tools and associated emotional design features.
The research results implied that the design process for a general purposed crowdsourcing platform is different from the platform for a product design with requirements on contextual understanding and emotional design. The integrated emotion and emotional design within a human-centred design process sheds light on this direction.
For full details of this project, click on the research paper link below:
