Embedment of empathic approach using touch point tool in concept generation phase of design process

Abstract

Empathic tools such as Persona, Ethnography, and Touchpoint have been used widely by designers in the early phase of design process to understand the users’ needs. Among the three tools, touchpoint has several advantages over the persona and ethnography such as ability to monitor user’s activities in a discrete way, focus a wide range of users, and reduces the reliability of a design practitioner on human expert activities. However, this tool has not been used in solving engineering problems. The aim of this study was to select an empathic tool to discover the significance and to embed the tool in the early phase of conventional design process. A design experiment was conducted by having two groups, which were using touchpoint and conventional design method in the early of design process. Both groups were given a design task that was related to agricultural. The outcomes of the experiment were design concepts. These design concepts were evaluated by design experts based on the criteria such as originality, technical feasibility and user benefit. A questionnaire was designed to ease the evaluation process. The expert scores for the design concepts were analyzed using Mann-Whitney U -test, where the P-value was set at 0.05. It was found that technical feasibility for both touchpoint and conventional design methods were not significantly different, meaning they have same capability. For the originality criterion, conventional design method was shown significant as compared to touchpoint tool. In opposite, the touchpoint tool exhibited significant result on the user benefit criterion. From these results, the touchpoint tool is more effective in analyzing and capturing the users’ needs before undergoing the ideation process than the conventional method.