Abstract

Design has been increasingly viewed as a discipline that attempts to develop products that satisfy the implicit needs of customers more than merely making things functional. These implicit needs of customers include emotional and aspirational needs. Therefore, the role of emotions in the design of a product has gained the attention of designers and researchers in recent years. However, capturing and genuinely understanding customers’ preferred product emotion is challenging, as the experience of emotions elicited by a product is a complex phenomenon. Most customers cannot clearly describe their experienced emotions while they interact with a product. Therefore, several researchers in the emotional design domain have developed methods that focus on understanding and evaluating customer emotions. Each of these methods has its specific relevance and usefulness, which should be taken into account according to the research context. The present article aims to review the available literature on the most common or most frequently used methods for assessing product-related customer emotions. A keyword search is conducted using online databases to find the relevant methods. The keywords used for this purpose were “assessment of emotion,” “product design,” and “customer emotions,” with limitations to subject areas of design, social sciences, and management. A total of seventeen such assessment methods used previously to evaluate customer emotions related to product design are selected from the relevant literature for the review. The methods are evaluated based on their benefits and disadvantages. To summarize our results, we propose a taxonomy of the methods selected for the study and develop criteria for comparing these methods for choosing a suitable one for the product design research context. It is expected that the findings of the present article will assist design researchers, cognitive scientists, and ergonomists in choosing the appropriate emotion assessment method while designing and developing emotional products.