I would like to point you to a wonderful piece called the “User Experience White Paper – bringing clarity to the concept of user experience“. This was written and put together by a group of 30 experts, as a result of the  Dagstuhl Seminar on Demarcating User Experience, September 15-18, 2010.

Most importantly not a definite document, but according to the experts and also in my opinion, an important step towards a common understanding on user experience. Have a look and tell us what you think.

Yesterday, I arrived back after a short week in Querétaro, Mexico. A beautiful place for an interesting conference on design: Factor Clave 2011. The conference theme was ‘the designer’s role in a world in crisis/change – How can designers better understand their context’. The programme was really interesting with besides my own contribution, inspiring presentations from Xenia Viladas, Roberto Holguin (Insitum), Javier Barquin (Applica), Yen Ching Chiuan (NUS, Singapore), Vanessa Sattele (Philiips Design), Daniel Andrade, Esteban Salgado (Grafitat), Fernando Martin and a most inspiring contribution by Candy Chang (CivicCenter).

The organisation was in the hands of a truly marvelous team of students of the Tech de Monterrey university. I have never felt more pampered then in this conference. I don’t think I have spent a full hour in my hotel room, due to their continuous care to feed us and offer us drinks and great company – GRACIAS A TODOS!

In the course of the 4 days I was in Querétaro, I gave a keynote presentation (see below), a Get Emocional! workshop (26 participants) and taught a class to design students (thanks to @dianalbarran).

The talk

My talk focused on sketching the properties of a world in change and what role designers have in this, plus, a possible answer to how they can influence world change by design. I state that emotional design can be a key factor (Factor Clave) in creating mindful, meaningful products and services that assist world change and improve people’s lives. Below is a slightly shortened version of the actual presentation.

An Emotional Unboxing Experience – Are (Emotional) Designers the Perfect Gift for a World in Change?

More highlights can be seen at Design & Emotion.com

Interested?

If you are also interested in booking us for your event, or to have us facilitate an in-company Get Emocional! workshop, please contact us!

Me and Lars have been on tour for the last 3 months, and have been teaching ‘design for emotion’ to over 130 people with diverse backgrounds. We have been in South Africa where we gave a key-note at the Saaffi seminar and a workshop in the lovely botanical gardens in Pretoria. In April we continued at the UOC (UX team) in Barcelona, then back to the Netherlands where we did the workshop with a large group of architects (JSA). Off to Spain again where we organized a workshop with Utopic_US in Madrid for talented designers from different companies in the Madrid area, flew to Bilbao (Spain) to give a key-note at the Emotion & Design seminar and gave a workshop to 34 of the attendants and went straight to Riga (Latvia) to be received by a great group of designers related to the Latvian Art Academy. We ended in Riga with a fast paced Pecha Kucha about emotional product experience.

Next week, we will be in Lisbon (June 29th) to give a Get Emocional! workshop as appatizer for the DBattle design conference (text in Portuguese, but workshop in English!) next year. We will be most happy to see you there! Until then, below is a short impression of our tour so far.

Pretoria

Barcelona

Madrid

Bilbao

Riga

Lisbon

Register now at the DBattle appetizer website! >>

However, lately we are giving more and more keynotes about emotion & experiences and people really like our Get Emocional! workshop, both as open subscription and in company. Therefore we decided to create a video as an introduction and trigger for this workshop:

It’s about how we get emotional, what happens in our daily life and what the ingredients of the workshop are.
 

 

Shortly it summarises the key learnings, but that went quite fast probably, so here they are again:

In the workshop you will:

• learn how to design for emotion
• learn how to build on personal values
• learn about consumer emotions

And much more of course! More information about the workshop can be found on the Get Emocional! website.

The upcoming workshops are in Madrid (Spain), Riga (Latvia) and Lisbon (Portugal). Contact us if you are interested in participating, want to co-organise a workshop or arrange a (tailored) in-company workshop.

The case / question raised was:

How get members involved in Bekader? Since 2004 there has been a 50% decrease of members despite the constant flow of students who have just graduated.

Building on the SusaGroup method, four steps to meaningful experiences, we started with step one. Measuring the emotional experience of the association Bekader and compare it to the emotional experience of the University of Twente.

First impressive result was that both the University of Twente and Bekader do not elicit disgust and hardly any fear. Zooming in on the rest of the emotions gives the following correlation graph.

From this overview can be concluded that the University of Twente (UT) evokes more satisfaction and Bekader more fascination and hope.

In the workshop we will further use the SusaGroup method to understand why Bekader elicits these emotions. What are the concerns of the people? After that, together with the Bekader participants, we will develop an emotional fingerprint (envision) and define specific actions and activities (conceptualise) to improve the emotional experience of Bekader.

Jobs may be the best example of a new breed of business leader who can intuit customer emotions. Another is Howard Schultz, the longtime CEO of Starbucks, who is selling not just high-priced coffee but also the idea of a “third place” between home and work. Such leaders are not easily replaced. When Schultz retired from Starbucks in 2000, the company went into a steep decline, and he was compelled to return in 2008.

In my view, this is why Apple has fans and others have customers. Apple is exactly doing what the number one trend of my blog post a couple of days ago was about: creating experiences for a specific group of people.

For those who cannot intuit customer emotions like Steve Jobs and Howard Schultz, at SusaGroup we have powerful tools and a strong method to measure and incorporate emotions into the design and development process.

I’m hoping that Apple won’t shift it’s course too much and that Steve Jobs will recover well and return.

To thrive in a more creative world, brands need to stop generic marketing and create experiences that are irresistible to a specific group of people.

Creating those meaningful experiences is exactly what we do at SusaGroup. In our method of four steps to meaningful experiences, we:

1. measure emotions and experience to create a benchmark
2. analyse and uncover emotional drivers of customers
3. formulate targets and an emotional fingerprint
4. bridging the emotion gap and design phase

To create an experience that is irresistible to a specific group of people it is important to recognise that drivers (step 2) are personal and based on our concerns and values. Therefore we believe it’s time to rethink the concept of segmentation and defining the group you want to bring this experience. It’s no longer about age, gender, city you live in. It’s about who you are, your values and drivers.

Let’s keep this in mind when working on the number one trend for 2011 in creating experiences that are irresistible to a specific group of people.

Enjoy watching the video:

This year, 556 researchers applied for a Vidi grant, of which only 88 were accepted. This acceptance rate of 15% is the lowest ever in the history of the  is 15 percent, the lowest ever in the history of the innovation grant.

Therefore we are very happy to congratulate Pieter, associate Professor at the Department of Industrial Design of Delft University of Technology and research advisor at SusaGroup. We expect to benefit as well from his inspiring research. The summary of his Vidi project as found on the NWO website is:

Positive Design
Dr. ir P.M.A. (Pieter) Desmet (m) 03.05.1972, Izegem (Belgium), TU Delft – Industrial Design
People using consumer products experience positive and negative emotions. This study analyzes how products elicit various positive emotions such as pride, pleasure, fascination and how this influences product usage.

As Pieter describes it himselves on his website: “funding five years of research with a focus on the roles of emotion in human-product interaction.”

This is also what our work at SusaGroup is about, so we’re glad Pieter is taking it another step forward from an academic perspective because next to implementation there is lots more to explore.