Translating User's Emotions to Product Properties (Case study: Ladies Wrist Watch)

Industrial design is attempting to answer physical, emotional and functional needs of human by including different fields such as product design, transporting design, interaction design and etc. Products have various functions and appearances, due to their users’ specifications. Industrial design is attempting to answer physical, emotional and functional needs of human by including different fields such as product design, transporting design, interaction design and etc. Products have various functions and appearances, due to their users’ specifications. Nowadays design is getting more specialized. The user needs are classified in two categories of physical and emotional. Physical needs can be divided to ergonomics, safety, usability and functional needs. Emotional needs can be divided to aesthetic and symbolic needs. Product design is a complex activity which aims to improve a product and answer user's needs. It should be mentioned that the goal of product design is not only providing user's physical needs, but also concerning psychological aspects of the user is very important. Products in advancing market should be design to provide user's interest. Concerning user's emotional needs can provide user's interest. Nowadays there are practical methods in emotional design. The interaction between user and product is very significant. Today user's emotional needs have a great influence on product design. Therefore, in order to persuade people to buy, there is a need to design products with the emotional considerations. Many attempts have been made to bring emotions to product design systematically. Quality Function Development (QFD) and Kansei Engineering are two systematic methods which can be used to design emotional products. In this paper QFD and Kansei Engineering are used to study user's interest in product design. Firstly 100 ladies wrist watches were selected among 1350 ladies wrist watches. These 100 watches were chosen based on their differences characteristics and design. 22 properties were defined for selected watches. Then these 100 watches were clustered in 10 categories bases on the defined properties. Clustering was used to find out the most related properties for each watch. A representative watch was chosen for each category. The representative watch covered the most number of properties in each category; therefore 10 watches were selected to be studied. Kansei Engineering was employed to study the watches. According to the choice of domain in Kansei Engineering, the representative watches were studied with 14 Kansei words. The study was done by questionnaire and interview. 96 ladies, between 20-30 years of age, were selected randomly. During the study user's facial reactions also were observed. The participants were asked to evaluate each watch on 14 Kansei words. All data from questionnaire and interview were analyzed in SPSS software. The analyzed data showed that there is direct relation between the users’ emotions and properties of the watches. As a result for each representative watch some Kansei words were recognized. It means that Kansei words described user's emotions on each watch. Due to the findings, it was concluded that the user's emotional needs were translated to product properties.