User-Product Experience and Emotions

The history of a product that we buy at shops goes through many phases. The whole history is named product development process (PDP). Marketing experts are those who trigger the process: they perform research on consumer preferences and expectations aiming to find out new needs and motivations for a new product. Subsequently, a rough idea of the open space for the new product potentially available on the market is illustrated to the product designers, who start creating concepts representing the new product, including the definition of its shape, architecture, materials, functions, and also address some issues like ergonomics and usability. The typical subsequent step consists of the product designers and the marketing experts analyzing and evaluating the concepts together, and agreeing on the selection of one concept, which will be the future product, which is transferred to the engineering designers, who check the feasibility and costs, and transform the concept into detailed technical specifications [1]. The concept proposed by the product designers may be subject to many modifications, mainly because engineers have to cope with various technical, economical and production constraints that may contrast the designers' choices. But an additional key issue to consider is the fact that marketing experts and designers express their idea about a product and its features by means of abstract, vague, and non-detailed descriptions, or even through similarities with the features of other products. Therefore, the probability that the product eventually detailed by the engineering designers is the one that marketing experts and product designers had in their mind is very unlikely, at least at the first design round. For the above mentioned reasons it is paramount to set up a validation practice, which can be used to review and modify the design, if necessary. The product development process includes many loops, back and forth between the various phases, which are required by the necessity to change the design due to engineering constraints, or because of non-satisfactory validation results. The validation practice can address product technical characteristics and performances, as well issues more related to users. In particular, when dealing with products for the consumer markets, which are interactive, some considerations about consumers, i.e. the future users of the product, and their relation with products are necessary as well. In fact, users interact with products, during their daily use but often already during the purchase moment. And both these aspects are important to be considered from a marketing analysis point of view. With this respect, the interest of both industry and research is recently focusing on the study of the user’s emotional reac-