CHARACTERIZING THE ROLE OF USER EXPERIENCE IN PRODUCT DESIGN

User-Product Interaction and Beneficial Aspect of User Experience in Product Design

Abstract

User experience, known as the users' cognition responses to the look and feel of a product, has been evolved and recognized as one of the prominent aspects in product design and development. Theoretically, the studies of user experience have been expanding, adapting from psychological research to design research. user experience, a concept which places users as a central focus, has been used for creating products that are provide aesthetically pleasing and pleasurable to use as it focuses beyond usability and traditional design strategies. However, since the concept of user experience is still broad and arguably unclear in definition, there are a few numbers of practical researches of user experience that stress the benefit of this emphasizes in different directions, such as creation of product differentiation by user experience, brand building and longevity of a product. This study provides an understanding of user experience concept and its relationship with product design by product specific example and how roles of user experience are generated. In addition, framework and model to explain the stages of user experience in product interaction is proposed. This study identifies three main roles and contributions of user experience in product design: user experience as product differentiator, decoding of complex technology and product longevity. Finally, a framework to explain the mechanism of user experience stages during an interaction with a product is proposed. This research expects to elicit the design researchers to further explore and investigate this topic in order to compels and expand the benefit of user experience in another direction. Particular design research effort is needed for developing tools and methods applicable in design practice that would enable designers to create differentiations of their products based on user experience approach.