Affective-cognitive design of product ecosystems for user experience

• Main Author: Zhou, Feng
• Other Authors: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Industrial engineering::Human factors engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/48038
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

As industry sectors mature, a critical challenge confronting many companies is how to provide users with engaging experiences within a product ecosystem (e.g., a subway station ecosystem). User experience goes far beyond cognitive aspects to encompass affective aspects, where the former accommodates users’ cognitive capabilities, tendencies, and limitations while the latter concerns how to elicit desirable emotional responses from users. Both aspects have major impacts on each other and importantly influence user satisfaction. Although companies have long been concerned with users in the product design and development process, the emphasis has been on the cognitive aspects to support users’ cognitive processes through human-product interactions, demonstrated as usability studies in the areas of human factors and human-computer interaction. Further, traditional usability studies often consider interactions between the user and a single object (product), ignoring the kind of user interactions in a context of product ecosystems that consist of multiple interdependent products, users, and ambient factors (e.g., environmental settings and cultural factors). On the other hand, user pleasure has been considered in the new development of human factors and ergonomics; affective human-computer interaction is also gradually being recognized. From a holistic perspective, it is imperative to study user experience design incorporating its two essential dimensions, i.e., the affective dimension and the cognitive dimension, in the context of product ecosystems. This research develops a conceptual model that elaborates the operational mechanism of key factors underlying product ecosystems for user experience design while leveraging both affective and cognitive dimensions of users. In addition, a technical framework is proposed to drive product ecosystem design for user experience with rigorous engineering methods. The technical framework has three consecutive and iterative steps, i.e., affective-cognitive need elicitation, affective-cognitive analysis, and affective-cognitive fulfillment.