Designing for positive user experience in product design: A qualitative analysis of toolkit design elements and their implications on emotional reactions and perceptions

Companies increasingly equip their customers with toolkits for user innovation and design to address the challenges of growing customer demand for unique products and increasingly heterogeneous customer preferences. Yet, compared to buying a product off the shelf, customizing products through toolkits requires higher efforts, time, and expertise from customers. To outbalance increased efforts, toolkits need to be designed in a way that makes the product design task fun and engaging. Based on marketing, human-computer interaction, and information systems research, toolkits can be designed as hedonic or utilitarian toolkits. We use focus groups to qualitatively analyze «visualization» and «detailed information» as toolkit design elements to generate hedonic or utilitarian experience, and their implications on toolkit users' emotional responses and perceptions. Our findings show that visualization and detailed information both help in enhancing users' realistic product understanding. We found that particularly visualization stimulates creativity and enjoyment in product design.