Making Users Talk about Product Experiences: Exploring the Three Levels of Human Processing in a Product Design Context

The complexity and diversity of a user’s product experiences can be difficult to predict. Nevertheless, to fully understand how a user perceive and interact with a product is of high importance to a designer in a market of hard competition and with deliberate users and customers. The communication between user and designer throughout the product development process is essential in order to reveal users’ habits and preferences, and by this unmask the different aspects of the total product experience.

This article presents a tool developed to enhance the user-designer dialogue. The tool is inspired by the model of the three levels of human processing as presented in Emotional Design (Norman, 2004), and is based on the idea that visual input will encourage users to tell their product stories. The tool and how to use it, as well as a project where the tool is employed are described in the following. It is suggested that the tool can be used in any product development process.