Hasta La Ideas

By Mathieu Turpault, Director of Design at Bresslergroup

As technology evolves, designers are focused more on multisensory design. We’re enthusiastic about its potential—but as with anything novel and compelling, there’s a tendency for the pendulum to swing too far.

Too many early attempts at designing multisensory products tend to maximize for all or most senses without any consideration of context or of how the different senses relate to each other when people are processing information. (We get it—we had the same tendency of maximizing for all the senses when we first started.) While this is fine as an experiment, it’s not appropriate as a product design methodology.

As we’ve dipped more into multisensory design, we’ve surveyed the breadth of relevant research being done (and that has already been done) in psychology and human factors. We’ve compiled a summary of it in our post, Psych for Product Designers: Research To Inform Multisensory Design.

This research has demonstrated that the most effective experiences are designed for perception and not for individual senses. This means that experiences and perceptions are contextual, and sensory research and analysis needs to pass through product designers’ user research techniques and methodologies before ending up as product features.

With this in mind, we’ve created some user research approaches for designers seeking to achieve the right mix of multisensory features:

1. Observe the environment.

Take note with all your senses of the environment and whether aspects of it might obscure sensory cues. We designed a medical product a few years ago for which we optimized for both tactile and audible feedback. It turned out the typical user (a surgeon) often blasts music in the operating room, making the audible feedback pretty meaningless.

(more…)