Author: jy846

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Redesign of bright stamps for Chinese market 

Researcher: Lin Fu
Involvement: Research advisor (chair: Prof. Dr. Jan Schoormans)
Research conducted in collaboration with IceMobile (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Publication:

  • Fu. L. (2015). Redesign of Bright Stamps for Chinese Market. Delft: Delft University of Technology.

The project was conducted in collaboration with IceMobile to investigate opportunities of using a digital stamp-based loyalty program in China. The stamp-based loyalty program is one of the basic and mostly used loyalty program types in Europe. With the popularity of smartphones, digital stamp program has become a new trend in loyalty marketing industry. The research focuses on the characteristics of Chinese consumers’ shopping behavior and shopping experience in supermarkets, and the determinants of a loyalty relationship between customers and retailers. A model of building loyalty relationship between a Chinese consumer and a retailer was proposed, based on which an app “easy sharing and early bird discount” was developed. The app intends to stimulate a sense of belongingness and engagement by making the experience social and vibrant. The app enables customers to share digital stamps through QR code scanning and offers a dynamic discount for customers by which they can redeem earlier with fewer stamps in limited time periods.

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Positive emotional granularity cards

Research conducted at Delft Institute of Positive Design
Publication:

  • Yoon, J., Desmet, P. M. A., & Pohlmeyer, A. E. (2016). Developing usage guidelines for a card-based design tool: A case of the positive emotional granularity cards. Archives of Design Research, 29(4), 5–14. Download
  • Yoon, J., Pohlmeyer, A. E., & Desmet, P. M. A. (2015). Positive emotional granularity cards. Delft, Delft University of Technology. ISBN: 978-94-6186-440-6. Download
  • Yoon, J., Desmet, P. M. A., & Pohlmeyer, A. E. (2013). Embodied typology of positive emotions: The development of a tool to facilitate emotional granularity in design (pp. 1195–1206). Presented at the 5th International Congress of International Association of Sciences of Design Research (IASDR), Tokyo, Japan. Download

Positive emotional granularity cards are meant to support an emotion-focused design process by helping designers to get a nuanced understanding of positive emotions. The card-set consists of 25 cards, each of which represents a distinct positive emotion. The card-set incorporates definitions of emotion labels, eliciting conditions, and visuals of expressive behavioral manifestations. The visuals of expressive manifestations were developed and validated to clearly characterize the specific emotions. The card-set can be used in both design research and design practice as a tool for communication and as a source of inspiration. For instance, designers are enabled to communicate their design intentions in terms of emotional impact, and end-users are enabled to report the distinctiveness of emotional experiences. Furthermore, divergent thinking in design conceptualization can be facilitated by exploring the relationship between varied eliciting conditions of positive emotions and product features.

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PoEm – A toolkit for well-being-focused user research 

Researcher: Dwitya Prasasta Umaritomo
Involvement: Research advisor (chair: Prof. Dr. Jan Buijs)
Research conducted in collaboration with Philips Consumer Lifestyle (Drachten, the Netherlands)
Publication:

  • Umaritomo, D. P. (2013). Emotion-Driven Research in New Product Development. Delft: Delft University of Technology.

How can products and technology be designed to be purposeful to people that use them? The objective of this project was to invcestigate how user research had been conducted within Philips Consumer Lifestyle and to embed user-centered approach in it. Interviews and workshops that involved designers and user researchers in Philips were conducted. The results showed that it was necessary to broaden the scope of user research from usability to users’ emotional experiences and well-being in the early stage of product development. Based on this insight, a design toolkit ‘PoEm’ was proposed. PoEm was developed building on theories in positive psychology with an intention to assist designers and researchers to examine users’ values, needs, beliefs, and aspirations in three perspectives: pragmatic, hedonic, and eudaimonic. Pragmatic aspects refer to the degree to which a product fulfills a user’s goal, hedonic attributes mean how well a product fulfills an intangible need and/or provides an activity that evokes pleasurable emotions, and eudaemonic attributes are about how much a product contributes to realizing a purposeful goal and offers engaging activities that are considered virtuous. PoEm includes a set of adaptive questionnaires, a guideline for the interview, and a manual for analyzing the collected data.

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User interface and interaction design guide for Wacom Bamboo Dock and Apps

Research conducted in collaboration with WACOM (Krefeld, Germany)

How can we develop a software that enriches users’ experiences by integrating pen-oriented interactions? WACOM interaction guide was developed to support designers and developers to create interactions and user interface of Bamboo Apps that leverage the use of a stylus. The focus of the guide was to help them:

  1. understand a set of supported pen interactions and the associated usages,
  2. implement and maintain a cohesive and consistent visual communication for Bamboo Dock and Apps,
  3. evaluate an App in terms of the quality of user interface and interaction design, and
  4. promote an end-user to have a strong association with brand awareness.

The guide discusses the brand image of Bamboo and how the Bamboo Dock Apps were conceptualized to be in line with the brand expression of Bamboo: playful and creative. Through a series of demonstrations, it shows the supported pen-interaction types, the differentiated aspects of pen-based input methods, and the general recommendations for designing interactions. In addition, user interface templates were proposed to help designers and developers create Apps that maintain the consistent look. The templates include basic icons and common control components, screen transitions, and animation effects.

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Design for interest: Exploratory study on a distinct positive emotion in human-product interaction

Research conducted at ID-StudioLab
Publication:

  • Yoon, J., Desmet, P. M. A., & van der Helm, A. (2012). Design for interest: Exploratory study on a distinct positive emotion in human-product interaction. International Journal of Design, 6(2), 67-80.
  • Yoon, J. (2010). Interest in human-product interactions. Delft: Delft University of Technology

Can we design interactions that evoke a distinct positive emotion? This project explored the possibilities to design interactions that elicit user interest. On the basis of appraisal theory, it was predicted that interest is evoked by a combined appraisal of novelty-complexity (a product must be appraised as novel and/or complex) and coping potential (one appraises oneself to have sufficient skills and resources to deal with an event). Three music players were developed to test this hypothesis. These were identical in terms of appearance, but different in terms of interaction qualities. The music player consists of a wooden container, a bar, a speaker, LEDs, and two electromagnets. The electronic components are housed inside the wooden container. The bar is for switching on/off, changing songs and controlling volume range. The setting of electromagnets and LEDs was programmed for manipulation of interaction qualities and behaviors of the music players. This project was featured in Dutch Ergonomics Society News.

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Q-sight, A product-service system for collecting customer feedback  

Research conducted in collaboration with NetQ (Utrecht, the Netherlands)

NetQ is a Dutch company that provides Internet-based tools for gathering customer feedback. In this project, NetQ asked to propose a new business direction and design interventions that enable the company to expand their product portfolio. Interviews with the clients who used NetQ’s existing solutions were carried out to explore design opportunities with respect to gathering and synthesizing consumer feedback. The factors that influence respondents’ motivation to participate in research or survey were investigated through focus groups. The interaction vision of the solution was that the customers voluntarily express their opinions with concrete underlying reasons, finding this process beneficial for themselves. We developed Q-Sight, an indoor customer feedback system that tracks the flow of customers’ movements, and measures their emotional states towards their surroundings (e.g., art pieces in the museum, the layout of a supermarket, etc.). Q-sight was devised to let the customers have the opportunity to create a memory of their experience: they can give feedback and keep it in the form of a photo album or share it through social media. The envisioned benefits for the client were: they can see how customers experience the space by seeing the tracking data, and gain insights into how they could improve the space or the services based on the reported customers’ emotions.

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Information system for the waiting room of the emergency department

Research conducted at Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology
Publication:

  • Yoon, J., & Sonneveld, M. (2010). Anxiety of patients in the waiting room of the emergency department (pp. 279–286). Presented at the 4th international conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (TEI), Cambridge, MA, USA: ACM.

Several studies have shown that although people in the waiting room of emergency department often feel numb, being afraid, or having no control, and hospital staffs often fail to notice these patients’ problems and to offer appropriate and timely patient care. This project aimed to understand the patients’ experiences in the waiting room and to develop a design intervention that enhances the waiting experience. I explored the context and interactions in the waiting room with a focus on the factors that cause anxiety of patients by observing them and their family members, and interviewing the head of the department. The main findings were distrust between patients and staffs of the hospital, the patients’ consistent focus on their status, and an uncertainty about the waiting time. To moderate these anxieties, an interactive information service that enables patients to gain sufficient information about the procedure and the waiting time was proposed. The solution creates an informative environment through an ambient visualization that embodies the patient profile and the order of waiting people in real-time on the basis of the result of patients’ triage tests and the operation policy of the department.

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“Sorry… What?”, Redesigning the Alcatel-Lucent compact conference module 

Research conducted in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent (Paris, France)

Conference calling is gaining popularity, especially video-based devices. Still audio-only conference call devices are often preferred for their privacy properties and low price compared to video. It has been shown that in audio-only devices, the insufficient non-verbal communication and context unawareness result in communication problems, which affects negotiations and user experience. This project focused on improving the usability of the Alcatel-Lucent 4125 Compact Conferencing Module concerning its function, aesthetics, and communication quality. Usability test of the model revealed that while using the conference module, inadequate product feedback resulted in communication issues related to focusing, understanding and being aware of all the members participating in the call. The product demanded an undesirable amount of attention during the conversation, which led to a clumsy and unclear user experience for the people involved. In the redesign, the enriched communication feedback was created by visualizing voice inputs and making the interactions more physically dynamic.