Gauging first-impression emotional responses to product and service designs
Desirability testing explores the affective response that different designs elicit from people based on first impressions.
Using index cards with positive, neutral, and negative adjectives written on them, participants pick those that describe how they feel about a design or prototype.
Testing can focus attention on responses from end users, instead of on personal opinions that often leave teams at an impasse.
When the process is applied repeatedly, the team can begin to compare and cluster the words that are most frequently chosen and visualize the results.
The method helps focus the design team efforts on shaping the exact emotional response they want people to have while using their products.
It can be conducted using low-fidelity prototypes or on products already in the public domain as a baseline before the team embarks on a redesign.