In current consumption structure, psychlogical needs are replacing physiological needs and gradually taking the lead. Consumers are paying more attention to emotional resonance and satisfaction alongside product quality.
It seems to be mostly reflected in the interaction design and experience design industry. But the rising of new demand means we should seek new directions to move with times, especially for physical manufacturing companies.
Changes in market demand guide business investment
"From a business investment perspective, Growth means Success."
For both internet and physical product enterprises, making every effort to launch new products and drive them to maket share, while paving the way for the next generation of products, is a core means of maintaining business growth in a developing market. What needs to be kept in focus is what kind of new highlights that the newly launched products should have for the current market and user demands.
Economic and cultural developments will bring about changes in consumer demand. Recently, many concepts have been put forward: psychological needs are replacing physiological needs in the structure of consumer demand and gradually taking the lead. Consumers are paying more attention to emotional resonance and satisfaction alongside product quality.
This conclusion seems to be largely reflected in interaction design and experience design industry.
Mobile App for a Masio-Powered Product by Zajno
Wallet App - Statistics & Goals by Viktor Svystunov
Gladdy - Diary and Emotional health assistant by Svitlana Bilan
Mindfulness Mobile Application by Tubix UX
On the contrary, current shallow innovation model in the field of physical manufacturing - improving, following and imitating - has made innovation always stuck to the behavioural level for their users.
As a result, the call for "usable and accessible" products are proliferating. The industry has become somewhat oversaturated and weak, following the same design guidelines. Users are overwhelmed and looking forward to a new breakthrough.
It is also time for physical manufacturing companies to "keep up with the times" and seek new directions.
The need for enterprise-level emotional design gives
concrete direction to product development
The impression of physical product enterprises, like Midea, Huawei and Dyson, is always that they have a "high technical threshold", "too complicated to operate", "obscure jargon" and "a wide range of functions and processes".
However, their emotional communication with users is more on the visceral level and behavioral level, leading to a fast and short product life cycle.
Bath Essentials for Toddlers by Monica Bhyrappa
FOMO(Fears of Missing Out) by Jinkyo Han
Mood Coffee Set by Nikolo Kerimov
Space Masher by OTOTO- Lior Bartal
When facing the fierce market economy mediation, gaining early insight into users's demand and launch new products in time to keep pace with development and adjust their businesss policies, is the consensus of entities with long-term development plans.
It seems that at this unpredictable demand shuffle juncture, many enterprises are more or less challenged with the confusion of how to open up new tracks and occupy new areas in advance.
The good news is that we may be able to try, based on the native definition of enterprise products, to flesh out the direction and methods of emotional design for enterprise products.
On the one hand, the core value of enterprise products is "to liberate productivity, increase capacity, improve efficiency, and assist users at the behavioural level to make efficient decisions that result in a positive emotional response to the product."
In deep reflection on emotional design, the focus will move from the behavioural level (providing users with products that are usable and accessible) to a more reflective level (providing products that provoke thought and empathy for a certain value), thus creating a sense of spiritual identification with the product and even the corporate brand, and consolidating the market share of the corporate brand.
A product that is designed to evoke empathy and reflection should deliver its message throughout the entire process of the user's use of the product, including the product itself, its function and usage, the experience and services it provides to users, etc.
Moreover, the method of conveying the emotional value should be straightforward, reflected in the appearance of the product, the semantic symbols, distinctive elements used in the product, and even the functionality of the product.
On the other hand, the driving force for companies to develop, design and launch new products "lies in the relentless pursuit of unity in terms of technology, culture, image, human factors and cost".
In terms of current design trends, many industrial designs for physical manufacturing still remain at the mindset of product appearance design or product function improvement. They cannot combine corporate image, culture and other human dimensions for product innovation as well as design comprehensively around new materials, advanced processes, user expectations, etc.
Technology is closely related to cost and human factors. And corporate image and its culture are strongly related. The layout of a company's product development requires not only an updated combination of technology, cost and human factors to consolidate and convey brand DNA, but also a intensive integration of them to break the "barrel effect" in product projects and successfully enter the market.
Often, we are not able to do both and produce a product that is complete and clear, innovative and in tune with demand.
So is there an other way to smoothly connect them together, or to mitigate the "barrel effect" and minimise the impact of the shortcomings on the business?
Perhaps the answer can be found in a product metric that cuts across technology, culture, image, human factors and cost, which is also a research-proven product value - Emotional Value.
Through products that spontaneously convey certain values and strong resonance with users, enterprises establish a strong emotional connection with users, thus consolidating and attracting their target user base; and by constantly launching products that express new ideas, enterprises can enrich its image and culture, broaden the user base while positively refreshing the user's perception of the brand.
Try to consider emotional design as the basis and entry point for experience design, or even certain functional design, combine the values and themes that designers want to convey and symbolize them,
start from users' emotional demands, systematically take stock of which scenarios in the usage need to integrate semantics with emotional themes,
then refine the design objectives and transform them into solutions with emotional care, combine with business schedule to develop a project."
These systematic innovarions can improve the user's subjective experience when using the product or subvert their original impression on the brand, leading to a deeper understanding and trust in the new corporate brand identity.
The theory can be derived from different but reliable design rules and processes depending on the corporate structure and staff allocation. "EmpathISY Design Studio" will always be on the path of discovery.
