Discovering Enhanced Cultural Probes through a Rapid Ethnographic Evaluation of Emotional Design

‘Emotion’ is a part of user experience that is known and accepted among the human-computer interaction (HCI) community. Indeed, as Norman states, “Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability go hand-in-hand in good design”. Therefore not only is the utility and usability of Web designs important, but also their fun, pleasure, and visual aesthetics.

The rapid ethnographical approach provides a well-known, efficient collection of field methods, as well as providing a reliable understanding of user experience and a reduction in time pressures that is associated with other types of research. We thus explored a novel technique employing a hybrid context of cultural probes with a rapid ethnographical method for the evaluation of emotional design.

The results of this approach threw up a surprisingly rich amount of user data; indeed so much so that we are still in the early process of analysing it. The results highlight that the various artefacts of methodological thinking involved in user emotional interaction to Graphic User Interface (GUI) of web design, indicates the richness of considering cultural probes in the newly emerging field of ‘Emotional design’.