Introduction to user research methods--Emotion Board (Mood Board)

Introduction to user research methods--Emotion Board (Mood Board)

By Use research Group

This is a handout to the workshop of the 2009 annual Meeting of the UCD Book Club. At that time, I was invited by UCD to hold a WORKSHOP on user research topics at the annual meeting. Just that time the company has a user research project is trying to use the emotional board (Mood Board) way to more to explore the user's vision of the product concept. After a period of trying, we found that the emotional board in addition to help us do visual research, in fact, the application in the user interview, can also help us to collect more information about the user's internal needs and views. So, at that time, I designed a workshop on the topic of emotion board to share some of our discoveries with our friends in the UCD.

What is the emotional board.

Visual designers may spend a lot of time producing exquisite, high-quality designs, with a quote from a user or customer: "That's not what I want." "In general, people don't know what they want until they have a physical object," he said. But after seeing the finished product, they can easily judge whether they meet their preferences or expectations. Therefore, before investing too much in the wrong design direction, it is necessary to understand the user's expectations and needs for style, so as to determine the visual style of the entire website or product.

The emotion board is a heuristic and exploratory approach, which can be studied on the following issues: Image style (photography style), color (color palettes), text typesetting (typography), patterns (pattern), and overall look and feel. Visual design and human emotions are closely linked, different design will always lead to different emotions.

In addition, the emotional board can be used as a visual communication tool to quickly convey to others the overall "feeling (feel)" the designer wants to express.

How to create an emotional board.

First of all, we need to define the experience keywords, in a design project, through stakeholder interviews and user research, research, designers created product personas, based on personas, integrated user research results and branding/marketing documents, you can get experience keywords (experience Keywords). When personas and experience keywords are identified, you can use the emotional board to explore the visual style of a website or product and serve as a basis for early communication with internal personnel.

Experience Keywords (experience Keywords) examples

Secondly, it should be based on time constraints, personal work habits and the needs of users to the emotional board of the presentation of choice. In general, you can differentiate the presentation of an emotional board from the entity/digital, and the two dimensions of a collage/refinement template.

A. Collage

This is the easiest way to create an emotional board. Using this mode eliminates the need to consider details such as fonts and specific colors. Find materials that inspire inspiration, which may contain screenshots of websites that convey similar styles and emotions. This approach is quick and interesting, but it has a certain ambiguity.

B. refinement of the template

Templates are used to show different elements. Such as:

In this form of emotional board, the definition of color, font processing (such as title and subtitle), button style and even picture style. A standard template allows people to focus on the feature element.

In general, the emotional board can be presented as an entity, but also in a digital way, taking into account the cost, time and other factors, we choose the way of digital, because this way more designers to provide a more flexible, diverse choices.

The third step is to select the material to create the emotional board, which is an iterative process.

How to use the emotional board.

In the use of emotional board process, the role of the experience keyword is very important. Here first to explain what is the experience of keywords, you can refer to the following several PPT screenshots (this PPT for UCD CHINA2009 ANNUAL MEETING IN the workshop on the PPT).

Access to experience keywords is the first work of the emotional board, generally from the internal stakeholders (related products and designers) and external users of two channels to obtain.

A large number of experiential word samples can be collected from stakeholder interviews and user studies. After obtaining these samples, it can be discussed internally, and simplified into several key words by summarizing.

Experience keyword extraction, you can use the internal emotional board (if limited by resources or corporate confidentiality policy), can also recruit users to complete.

In the interior, by visual designers to complete, pay attention to the following points:

1. More than 3 sets of emotional boards need to be made for review.

2. The process of production is an iterative process that requires the internal team to deliberate on decisions.

3. The form of the emotional board can be varied, such as collage or refinement of the template (the difference between the two is in the document)

If you recruit external users, be aware of the following points:

1. The moderator needs to constantly ask respondents to explore the reasons behind the selection of pictures: "Why do you choose this picture." Can you share your thoughts with us? ”

2. Notice the difference of the excavation. To explore the differences of opinion among the respondents, 100 hearts have 100 ha Remt, the same picture for different respondents may have different explanations, if several respondents also choose a picture to represent their respective feelings of a brand, pay attention to ask them to choose the reason for this picture is the same.

Can be presented to the user's limited picture, therefore, in the selection of pictures, the need for internal research and design staff synergy, according to the visual design needs to consider several dimensions combined with the existing keywords for image screening. In general, before the picture is presented to the user, the internal staff has made clear the meaning of each picture, in the user selection and after the interview, the two aspects of the comprehensive analysis of data to obtain the final results.

The above is a summary of some tips for manipulating the emotional board. The following share two user instances in the emotional board to deepen your understanding of the emotional board. From the following two PPT can be seen, the use of emotional board mode, users are significantly more interested in sharing their feelings of the product, and the narrative is more organized. Interested students, you can download the relevant audio files to do further understanding.

User record file Download:

\\\\uedc\\uedc\\document\\ with research data \ Project Archive \\moodboard\\

(Download only within the company)

Finally, provide some resources for online color palette to help us to select pictures for the emotion board and extract color from the picture.

Adobe Kuler

colr.org

Colour lovers

4096 Color Wheels

Color schemer

Color Palette Generator

WEB 2.0 Color Palette

Color Scheme Generator

Colorjack

Color Harmony

Color Blender

Color schemer Online v2

Colordb

Accessibility Color Wheel

Color Hunter

Genopal

Pic2color