Keywords

1 Introduction

People emphasize the spiritual significance of consumption and emotional resort in the era of experience consumption. Consequently, the human factor is tremendously focused during the design process such as human-centered design, user-centered design and consumer-centered design. The main core issues are to realize the real demands of consumers and to confirm whether users are satisfied with the designed products and services. Market surveys and focus groups and so on were the common methods to collection consumer information on earlier days. Designers also conducted participant design to explore consumer behaviors or observe in the lab. However, when people were aware of being observed, their true colors would not be revealed causing the difficulty in excavating the real problems. Designers need to develop empathy towards users (to feel how the users feel) and understand the potential demands of users so as to satisfy user requirements. As a result, methods of literature review, case study, in-depth interviews and grounded theory are adopted in this research. Four designers of S brand were aimed as the object of study and in-depth interviews were made to understand the thinking processes of the designers. Thus, the thinking models of these four designers were constructed and analyzed and the conceptual model of empathic design was demonstrated by probing the process, analysis of the grounded theory, summarization of literature reviews and comparison and analysis of studies.

2 Literature Review

  1. 1.

    User-centered Design: Norman took the psychological aspect for emotional design recently and used the concepts of designers and users as examples to develop a successful and identical psychological model commonly shared by designers and users. The conceptual models of the designers and the users as shown in Fig. 1 communicate through products and products communicate the messages of systematic images. Norman and Draper (1986) proposed user-centered design (UCD) and Norman (1988) defined UCD as a philosophy in compliance with demands and interests of users to produce a usable and understandable product.

    Fig. 1.
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    Conceptual model (Norman 2005:94)

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It is critically important to know the expectations and needs of users prior to launching a new product in particular. Thus, designers can’t just resort to their own experiences and expertise to design similar products. More related information from consumers is required. For instance, users can be invited to try new products and describe their ideas and defects about such products as a reference for designers. Users are like co-designers, which is unprecedented. We name such approach of data collection as user-centered design currently. The most common questions include “What does the user want?” “Why does the user want this?” and “What does the user expect?” etc.

  1. 2.

    Role Playing: Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, mentioned the true experience of Kristian Simsarian, a designer of IDEO, being a patient in an emergency room at a seminar on serious play in 2008. Altay Sendil, another designer of IDEO, used to have his hair on the chest removed and experience the moment when the dressing patch was removed as the pains chronic patients felt. These experiences are role playing, which is a powerful sensation that helps designers to think when designing. In other words, designers experience the things they are about to design through playing the roles (Brown 2008). After designers experience in person, they can apply it to find out the products, services and environment that suit users best.

  2. 3.

    Scenario-oriented Design Approach: Acer introduced scenario design from IDEO in 1990, which was like the mind map of users. Scenarios or stories that are transformed from rational data are the most touching. Designers explain events and texture and integrate sense and sensibility via storytelling and scripts as well as visualizing imagination through different scenarios so as to understand various needs of the users (Yu et al. 2001). The process of script design is illustrated in Fig. 2. Four steps of producing a script, including introduction, elucidation of the theme, transition to another viewpoint and summing up are utilized to set up a story. Designers then absorb the related information and convert it to a communication tool so as to design the products, services and environment that meet demands of the users.

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    Process of script design (amended from Yu et al. 2001, P: 13)

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  3. 4.

    User Experience (Prototypes): it is a term to test use and satisfaction of a product and is usually used for software or marketing testing. Norman (1999) described it as a process of product development that starts with users and their needs rather than with technology. Kuniavsky (2003), one of the initiators of Adaptive Path, said in his book Observing the User Experience that how to apply it extensively to more user research techniques of high efficiency. Rubinoff (2004) considered user experience was based on four elements, including brand, use, function and satisfaction, which provided a key to success. Paluch (2006) mentioned on his website that user experience was the description of a user about the feature of any product when using it, which could extend to cars, cellphones, magazines or kids’ toys. The significance is how the user feels about the product or service and how to put it into words. Reiss (2009) defined user experience (UX) as a sum of a series of interactions in his blog.

3 Methodology

In-depth interviews, design of question items, case study, analysis of the grounded theory, an understanding of the problems related to empathic design and literature review were conducted in this research. The design processes of four designers (two designers and two senior designers) from the same brand were compared and analyzed. The in-depth interviews were analyzed and summarized by the grounded theory to develop the empathic design model (Fig. 3).

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Research structure

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3.1 Method of Study

The definition of an in-depth interview made by Minichiello et al. was similar to that by Taylor and Bogdan (1984). The research and the information provider encounter face to face repeatedly so that the views expressed by the information provider about his/her own way, life, experience or scenario can be understood (Minichiello et al. 1996). The qualitative interview approach was adopted in this research and a semi-structured interview was made with individual designer on his/her design process.

3.2 Object of Study

Purposive sampling was adopted to choose the object of study and the researcher judged and selected the samples. There were four people to be interviewed with, who were the designers of brand S (including two designers and two senior designers). The products, services and management concepts of brand S are customer-oriented, 100% customer satisfaction and complete sincerity. The theme under study is correlated to the features of the population. The profile of these four designers who applied empathy to truly understand the real needs of users and meet their demands is listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Basic information of objects of study
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4 Results and Discussion

The case of brand S was studied and their designers were served as the objects of study. They have more than one thousand showrooms around the island and their outlets are mainly in the department stores, specialty shops and cosmeceutical stores. Four of their five showcase designers were interviewed due to the huge quantity of their stores. How these four designers applied empathy to design will be examined carefully in this research. Cases of these four designers who put themselves in customers’ shoes will be analyzed and their thinking models in design will be generalized.

4.1 Comparative Research Analysis

The individual design process, ideas and implementation of these four designers are compared and analyzed with eight question items and summarized in Table 2. The comparison is concluded as follows:

Table 2. Comparison of four designers
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The design process of the designers is summarized as the following: the same places of the brand are that (1) designers investigate prior to design, including site surveys, measurement, understanding customer segments and communication with users; (2) designers communicate with people participating in the design project over the design plan, 3D drawing and 3D virtual drawing during the design process; (3) designers coordinate and communicate with collaborative manufacturers over implementation; and (4) designers inspect and review upon completion for design evaluation.

The different places are that: (1) designers interview with users face to face for an in-depth understanding of users’ needs and experience the product and the service process in person for investigation before design; (2) presentation of design details, consideration of costs, drawing communication and creative implementation during the design process differ; (3) completion schedule differences, production costs, design limitations and integration of creative design for design execution are different; and (4) designers taking part in inspection upon completion and reporting for the stage of design evaluation vary.

4.2 Analysis Result of Grounded Theory

Open coding is to retrieve the terms (schema) related to the subject from data collected through in-depth interviews and the schema is condensed to several categories, which become concepts or themes (cognitive structure) that symbolize special meanings of the data. As these four designers were interviewed respectively, the in-depth interviews and the grounded theory are analyzed and summed up as follows: 367 concepts in total with 75 sub-categories and 24 categories. These main and sub-categories are then introduced to the individual empathic design thinking model (Table 3).

Table 3. Decoding table of four designers
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P1 has 87 concepts, 17 sub-categories and 6 categories, whose design process is illustrated in Fig. 4. P2 has 68 concepts, 18 sub-categories and 6 categories, whose design process is shown in Fig. 5. P3 has 89 concepts, 19 sub-categories and 6 categories, whose design process is illustrated in Fig. 6. P4 has 123 concepts, 21 sub-categories and 6 categories, whose design process is shown in Fig. 7.

Fig. 4.
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P1’s empathic design thinking model

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Fig. 5.
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P2’s empathic design thinking model

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Fig. 6.
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P3’s empathic design thinking model

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Fig. 7.
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P4’s empathic design thinking model

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5 Conclusion

It is found from the research that different design fields lead to various applications of empathic design steps and methods after a cross comparison of empathic design theories and design practice. As far as the showroom design area is concerned, empathic design ways used by these four designers respectively include (1) putting oneself in other’s shoes, (2) experiencing in person, (3) on-site practice, (4) instinctive design, (5) listening to customers, (6) achieving a consensus and (7) association. Finally, empathic design in the showcase design domain is defined as follows: problems are located from the showcase design locale and designers provide satisfactory service to customers via empathic design methods like putting oneself in other’s position, experiencing in person, on-site practice, and listening to customers, etc.