Designing for Value: Insights from the Emotional Appraisal Approach to Understanding User Value

Abstract

Value is increasingly understood as the entity that is proposed by companies and determined by users. Then, how can design facilitate the user-led value determination process? The overall value creation mechanism includes two elements: co-creating service experiences and evaluating service experiences. While designers have actively studied the former by applying human-centred design research to understanding unique and contextual user experiences, they lack insights into the latter. This study takes an emotional appraisal approach to understand users’ value determination process of a library service and illustrates how the approach can contribute to designing for user value. Based on the insights, a model for systematic user-centric design approaches to better support the overall value creation process is proposed.

Keywords:

• design for value
• service design
• service experience
• value creation
• appraisal theory

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eun Yu

Eun Yu is an assistant professor of communication design at Seoil University in South Korea. She has an educational and professional background in visual communication design, user interface design, and interaction/experience design. She obtained her PhD at Lancaster University, United Kingdom, with her research on understanding service design practices and contributions to new service development by making a link between design and service marketing. Her research interest lies in multiple perspectives on service design, especially the design perspective and marketing/management perspective, and she focuses on how both can mutually benefit each other.