Designing Pleasurable Products

This book looks at how human factors are being used more and more in the product design process within commercial manufacturing organisations. It shows how designs can appeal to the user holistically, so that products are a joy to use. Human factors considerations are increasingly being incorporated into the product design process. Users are seen more as being important factors in the overall look and usability of products than just as passive users. We are now treated as cognitive and physical components of the person/product system. The author, who is one of the leading lights in the field of cognitive ergonomics, looks at approaches that assume that if a task can be accomplished with a reasonable degree of efficiency and within acceptable levels of comfort, then the product can be seen as fitting to the user. In this book it is argued that in practice these approaches can be dehumanizing. People are more than merely physical and cognitive processors. They have hopes, fears, dreams, values and aspirations, indeed these are the very things that make us human. Designing Pleasurable Products looks both at and beyond usability, considering how products can appeal to use holistically, leading to products that are a joy to own.

Written by Patrick W. Jordan, a leader in cognitive ergonomics, this landmark resource not only explores usability, but takes the reader beyond it. The author explains how good designs can appeal to the user holistically, leading to products that are a joy to own and use. He examines how human factors are being used more and more in the product design process within commercial manufacturing organizations. The book delineates a practical framework, providing a structured approach to the creation of product design concepts, describes new design and evaluation techniques and established methodologies, such as Kansei Engineering, and includes a pre-validated questionnaire for evaluating designs.