Vodafone Mobile Clicks is an international, high profile contest for the best mobile internet startup. The best mobile internet startup is selected by a professional jury in three different jury rounds. The jury selected the very best entries based on the 5 criteria mentioned below:

• Originality, creativity and innovativeness
• Technical and operational ability
• Economic and financial viability (business case)
• Use case and end-user value
• The quality of the members of the (management) team (e.g. their experience, knowledge, skills, relationships)

Snapje is an application to practise emotion recognition in relation to the context for children with autism. We’re very happy that we made it to the second round. This gives us a lot of (positive!) energy!

More information can be found here: http://www.vodafonemobileclicks.com/blog/

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THE 10 MOST ADDICTIVE SOUNDS IN THE WORLD

1. Baby giggle
2. Intel
3. Vibrating phone
4. ATM / cash register
5. National Geographic
6. MTV
7. T-Mobile
8. McDonald’s
9. ‘Star Spangled Banner’
10. State Farm

In our Get Emotional! workshop at HooHa Sensorimix, we worked closely together with Eric Linder alias Polar. He’s a great artist and sound chemist. A part of his song was used in a commercial of “Deutsche Telecom”. He shared with us some of the mystery behind creating powerful sounds and music in general. For us this underlined the importance of matching emotional experience of a brand with that of sounds and/or music used in commercials. Therefore we continued to work on a dedicated tool for emotions and music and/or sound. This would allow you to measure the emotional experience of a brand or product using PrEmo and find the right matching music. We felt that PrEmo as a method would not fully cover the complexity of measuring music emotions.

Sounds and brands
The researchers also presented a top ten of branded sounds:

Branded sounds

1. Intel
2. National Geographic
3. MTV
4. T-Mobile
5. McDonald’s
6. State Farm
7. AT&T
8. Home Depot
9. Palm Treo
10. PC Richard

The list presented by Buyology et. al. is of special interest to us since we have just finished a method to measure emotions of music, called Chartistic. You will definitely read more about that soon. It would be very interesting to see what kind of emotions are being elicited by this top ten of tunes. And do they match the emotional experience of the brand?

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Matthew Goodwin (the director of clinical research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab) sees numerous possibilities for the iPad.

Every year, millions of dollars are spent researching genetic and environmental factors that could be associated with autism. There has been some recent success in identifying certain abnormalities in the DNA.

That’s important research, says prominent autism expert Matthew Goodwin, the director of clinical research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, but it doesn’t improve quality of life for people who have autism now.

The iPad is some great piece of hardware to facilitate improving the quality of life now. However, the applications that you can install on it will in my view make the real difference.

Having read the article I believe we need to expand our developments efforts for Snapje and include the iPad as well. Using the iPhone to gather situations and using the iPad to play the games and evaluate the situations using the emotions can be a great combination.

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Recently I visited Copenhagen (Denmark) for my summer holiday. I was immediately taken in by the city and it’s people. Copenhagen is breathtaking and the Danish design philosophy is found on every street corner.

Apart from visiting such places as the Normann Copenhagen store I snuck a peek in the Dansk Design Center. The centre offers some very interesting exhibitions showing products, from LEGO to the Egg chair, that span the history of Danish design.

One particular exhibition caught my eye though. 10+ Design Forecast shows which factors have influence 21st century design, and which have the greatest impact on design trends today and in the future. I snapped a picture of one of these factors (please excuse the subpar iPhone picture quality):

Emotional design
More than ever, we are controlled by emotions and experiences, and this is a trend that will become increasingly apparent in society and in future design solutions. Increasingly, consumers seek to create an emotional and experiential relationship with the individual design solution, which often enhances the longevity of these products and services. Thus, in a sense, it is the individual perspective that determines whether a relationship and an experience are established between the user and the design solution – and thus whether an emotional design is achieved.

It’s always good to see that others recognize the importance of emotions in design. Especially when those ‘others’ are the Danish, with their rich design history.

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It’s interesting to see the wide range of intended use, job titles and the fact that requests came from all over the world.

Originally, PrEmo has been developed by Dr. Pieter Desmet from Delft University of Technology and research advisor at SusaGroup for product design. However, over the years it has become apparent that a non verbal instrument to measure emotions can be used for much more applications.

Intended use of PrEmo

The main intended use still was design(research) and product experience. It was also recognised as promising for enabling innovation in general and in improving packaging design.

An interesting observation is that people also intend to use PrEmo for website evaluation. In short notice we will be running a beta test for a small group of companies for your new version of the LEMtool (an instrument dedicated to measuring website emotions). Interested in participating in this Beta? Contact us!

International coverage

The requests kept coming all night. Our mailbox was overflowing. While the majority of the requests came from Europe (a little more than 50%) we saw a relative high number requests coming from South America.

It’s cross cultural validity is an important strength of PrEmo. Since we use animated cartoon characters instead of words, the tool in independent of language differences. Furthermore does using animated characters enables people remaining in their right brain (used to process emotions and visuals) instead of rationalising the emotion using their left brain (verbal and analytic).

Interested in using PrEmo?

Do you want to use PrEmo for example to improve on design and the user experience or enable emotional innovation? Contact us or visit the PrEmo online website. PrEmo is available as an online tool and you can easily create your own experiment in our toolbox.

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In my view this is also about creating experiences, but with a specific objective: evoking creativity. He uses the environment approach as an enabler. This is closely related to PanorEmo, our tool to assess the emotional experience of environments.

Therefore, we warmly welcome his research project “The creative environment” in which he and Dr. Karin Tanja-Dijkstra will by answering the question:

Is it possible to design an environment that stimulates physical activity and thereby creativity?

Check out his entire presentation where he introduces himself and presents his project.

You can contact Joren to exchange ideas and help him further develop his PhD research project.

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Their introduction, to me, is so true:

If we all know that buying desicions are based on emotions and not on rational processes, why then are we still asking consumers for their rational opinion in focus groups, online panels and interviews.

While supporting their claim of importance of emotions for market research, our approach at SusaGroup is slightly different. In this post I will compare some methods and explain pro’s and con’s of the different approaches.

As a solution iMotions present the attention tool. This is eye tracking software which interprets the movement of eye as an expression of brain function. They claim to be the only tool in the industry that can deliver the full range of eye tracking metrics, reading metrics and emotion metrics in a non-obtrusive way. Furthermore they recommend to use the tool in a testing facility.

Referring back to research by Dr. Pieter Desmet in his article on Measuring Emotions, he concludes:

Emotions are best treated as a multifaceted phenomenon consisting of the following components:

• behavioural reactions (e.g. approaching),
• expressive reactions (e.g. smiling),
• physiological reactions (e.g. heart pounding),
• and subjective feelings (e.g. feeling amused).

Each instrument that is claimed to measure emotions in fact measures one of these components.

Building on that conclusion one can question whether the attention tool does in fact measure emotions. Without knowing the details behind their tool, I don’t believe one can measure emotions just by tracking an eye. However, a webcam in a lab-setting can provide very interesting data. The face recognition tool Facereader by Noldus for example analyses facial expressions. One of the downsides is that it can only measure basic emotions.

Furthermore a disadvantage measurement tools that rely on a lab setting is that we are not tapping in to a real authentic experience in someone’s real life. Wouldn’t you experience the same product differently in a clean lab or just at home using it like you would really use it?

In their video, iMotions also asks the question:

Why do we still rely on consumers’ subjective input on innovative products?

Again referring to the paper of Pieter Desmet, he writes: “People are expert at interpreting emotional expressions.”.

Therefore, in my view the answer is “Yes we do, but with the right tools”.

At SusaGroup we strongly believe in non-verbal self report methods. In this way we do not rely on words (non-verbal), but do engage the person because he or she is very capable of expressing him/herself. However, none of the methods is perfect.

Combining several methods can bring us to even more powerful and reliable tools. For example, using eye-tracking as a trigger to question someone about his/her feelings using a non-verbal scale like PrEmo. An interesting thought. Let’s do some R&D on how we can use eye-tracking in a home setting using just a simple webcam.

Check out the entire iMotions video below.

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If you know what your customers are experiencing and thinking, then you know where you need to make improvements to increase the Net Promoter Score (NPS), increase turnover and cut costs. Often, standard measurements and studies do not provide sufficient information.

Their customer journey consists of three phases, measuring, experiencing and improving.

Measuring customer experiences

It does not really become clear how they actually measure experiences. Do they use observation, self-report tools, rational methods or visual methods? Nevertheless, starting with measuring allows you to develop a strategy, benchmark and set targets in terms of emotion profile.

Experiencing the customer experience

I would interpret “Experiencing the customer experience” as “Go through the process yourself, act as a customer”. At Design for Conversion 2009, former rocket scientist Karl Blanks (co-founder of Conversion Rate Experts) presented some interesting results on this topic. You might want to check ‘How we made $1 million for SEOmoz.‘ Actually trying to go through the process that your customer will experience in my view is very useful. Especially when you’re dealing with services. Applying this to product design is difficult. In the end I think that acting as a customer contributes to process optimisation and understanding the emotional drivers.

Improving the customer experience

As for every design cycle or improvement loop the final step is about implementation. Looking through emotion or experience glasses can reveal interesting insights. For TNO it resulted in improved customer experience with the aim of realising higher conversion, fewer calls and a higher Net Promoter Score. At SusaGroup we have gathered similar results.

PrEmo as a tool to improve an experience

We used PrEmo to evaluate the performance of the complaint process at an insurance company. This was a research project among real customers who had filed a complaint and whose case was closed. We measured their emotions before (measured afterwards) and afterwards.
It gave some really interesting insights in the key factors determining a positive experience. One of the learnings was that compensation was not the main driver. In some cases, to resolve the complaint it was needed to contact the client by phone. It turned out that despite the outcome in terms of compensation, the people who were called had a significant more positive experience.

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Tim Brown writes:

At IDEO we have been working on the topic of designing organizations for a while, most specifically the design of organizations to be more innovative. My struggle with this particular domain of design thinking has been one of aesthetics. Great design thinking results in  functionally and emotionally satisfying solutions where the emotional value is generated through the creation of meaning. In design, meaning largely comes from aesthetics and so I have been wondering how to think about aesthetics when considering the design of organizations.

Probably a design of an organisation is the resultant of all the aspects mentioned above. Like “Designing for emotion!” in the field of product experiences, consistency between all different aspects is probably key in creating meaningful experiences for employees and beautiful organisations.

But if the answer to the question “Can organisations be beautiful?” is YES, how do we in fact design those beautiful organisations? Where do we start and how do we align all different aspects?

To me, it is about the people of the organisation. In my view if they have a meaningful working experience, a beautiful organisation is born. People who are proud of their organisation, happy in their job, working together towards sustainable results will enable meaningful experiences for their customers.

At SusaGroup we are working on applying PrEmo (our tool to measure emotions) on organisations. Even though this approach is still under development, we feel it will have great added value in the field of organisational change and organisational design. Knowing the actual emotional experience of employees towards their daily work and their organisation will enable you to work on designing a beautiful organisation.

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You are probably familiar with the tele-marketing phenomenon: People calling you to sell you some product, just when you’re about to have dinner. Of course, you are much to nice to verbally express the intense anger you’re feeling. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a tool that may help you to express yourself without yelling.

The tool in question is called AffectPhone, and, as seen in the image above, consists of two sensors that measure the electrical resistance of the skin in the fingers (Galvanic Skin Response) and a peltier module that can be heated or cooled.

The GSR sensors are used to measure the emotional arousal of a person holding the handset and sends that information to the phone of the person on the other side of the line.  Depending on how emotionally aroused you are, the peltier module of the phone of your conversation partner will heat up or cool down in order to communicate your emotional arousal.

Unfortunately, since only arousal is communicated, that pesky telemarketer may still think you are just extremely exited about the fantastic offer, instead of furious about the rude intrusion.

(Rekimoto Lab via Gizmodo)

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