Conference article

In this study we are concerned with user operation in product design and try to explore its metaphorical expressions followed by applying it to design education. First of all, we review three types of user operation to expound their indexical associations with the user’s first visual impression. Then, we conducted a design course for master’s students. These students were guided to complete creative lamp design concepts. They illustrated how special and interesting ideas can come out of a focus on expressions of user operation. After the initial analysis, we found that it’s not easy for students to create reasonable ideas under the common context of user operation. Furthermore, we took Grounded Theory as the research method and then conducted in-depth interviews with sound recordings to investigate professional opinions and suggestions on user experience of operating these design works. We chose six students’ lamp designs as the stimuli and recruited three Taiwanese senior design practitioners with at least six years of professional experience. Each design expert was guided to express their ideas regarding applying these design skills to go beyond the first metaphorical expression. The oral comments during the interviews were transcribed into text files and were analysed by the qualitative data analysis software. Finally, we found out five typical factors of metaphorical user operation - detection, safety, ritualization, intuitive, and effect after operation.

User experience, user operation, metaphor, design education