How much can you love a product?

Working definition of the term Joy-of-Use

Before trying to influence Joy-of-Use, a working definition of the term itself is necessary to check if we can influence it.

Joy-of-Use will be understood in the following approach as an extended user experience. This implicates Joy-of-Use lets the user profit from using a product and increases the positive emotions by using.

What are the advantages by following the approach

The user defines for himself a product character based on his individual requirements for each product he use. This product character is an indirect valuation of the product. These general requirements are mostly understand as functionality, design, usability. But in our times the most offerers satisfy these general requirements. Now the user needs another criteria to decide which product he likes more: Joy-of-Use.

A positive product character strengthens the will of using a product - so if Joy-of-Use influence the product character positively, it strengthens the will of using the product. Specially in our time, where we got an oversaturation of websites we need a factor to stand out of the others.

Human Needs

People got general basic needs they want to satisfy: e.g. food, water or oxygen. But there are also more basic needs which could be infuenced by using a website. All actions try to satisfy the basic needs and based on this the actions are rated. So if a website can fulfill some needs, the action of using the website will be rated better.

Because of this assumption I compared several theories of the basic human needs:

Abraham Maslow
Frederick Herzberg
Steven Reiss
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The result is a list of some basic needs which can satisified by a website.

Expert theories

On the other side I didn't want to disregard the theories of experts in this domain. So I compared the factors to influence Joy-of-Use of the following theories:

Donald Norman "Emotional Design"
Marc Hassenzahl "Hedonic Quality"
McCarthy and Wright "Experience"
Kees Overbeeke at al."Emotionally Interaction"
Patrick W. Jordan "Pleasurable Products"
Peter Desmet "Designing Emotions"

Defining a framework for influencing Joy-of-Use

There are three steps of understanding Joy-of-Use:

Emotions - cognitive and affective emotions
The user an his indiviual requirements
The perception of a product