Emotional Design: Study of the color preferences of Iranian users

This paper is concerned with emotional design, which can influence user experience and combine it with happiness and enjoyment. Emotions have a crucial role in the human ability to understand the world. The human emotions play an important role in what people think and how they act. It can be said that, emotions influence the human behavior. Today, due to the technological improvement, designing a product that has a good function and is match with the users physical needs, is not enough. Users buy a product, not only for functional aspects of it, but also they are attracted to emotional usability of the product. Therefore, designers are more focused on emotional aspects of design. The products that are designed based on emotional design are more desirable and bring more satisfaction to the user. They appear to the user to be more effective, by virtue of their sensual appeal. Form, function, material and colour are four important elements of emotional design. Correct uses of these elements in a product, evoke positive emotions in the customers. Form plays the role of an informative messenger that attracts consumers through devices, offering a unique sensibility. In emotional design, designers have translated functions into emotion through human senses. In fact emotional design generates psychological effects through physical devices to transform the nature of function. Material stimulates human sensations by vision and touch. Touch is the most analytic of senses. Colour is one of the fundamental elements of emotional design, which can stimulate different senses of users. Colour can strongly affect the form of the product and the feeling of the user. A product with appropriate colour gets more popular and will find a good market. Appropriate colour not only matches with the form and function of the product, but also matches with the culture and preferences of the user. Therefore, in order to be able to select an appropriate colour for a product, there is a need for having a good knowledge of preferences of the users. Every single colour has a meaning and influences the human emotions in its own way. Therefore, a case study was performed to investigate the Iranian youngsters’ preferences regarding colours. For this aim a questionnaire was made. Eighty five Iranian men and women between 20 and 30 years of age were studied by filling the questioners. This questionnaire contained questions about the emotions of the people concerning different colours. The colours that offered in the questionnaire were selected from the Faber Castle’s standard pallet of 120. In order to analyze the results, the colour was classified to several groups, based on people trends to warm and cold colours, dark and light colours and so on. This study had two steps. At the beginning, the Persian youth general tastes were identified. Then the relations between colours and the aesthetic factors in emotional design were studied. Data were analyzed by Excel computing software. The results of this study can be used by designers for selecting appropriate colours for different products.