The guidelines of conducting the process of HVM crossing

There are 5 steps in our method to attain the proposed HVM used for design.

The following are the guidelines (2 don’ts and 7 do’s) for application design by drawing from the method.

Fig 5-4 steps of conducting a P-HVM for design

step1. Cases preparing

Before conducting interviews, designers should prepare some existing cases from the field of target design as the attributes for laddering.

The cases should be diversified that can lead to wide-ranged values (Do’s - 1) To get the diverseness of personal values, designers shouldn’t limit the varieties of attributes. On the contrary, we should diversify the types of cases.

step2. Conducting interviews by laddering skill

There are three stages in the interview. In stage one, designers introduce the prepared cases that related to target product for participants. In stage two,

participants group the cases by their percept, and designers try to keep asking them to compare and explain the reasons of preference order to attain personal values.

Then, stage three, after the comparison; participants start to present their favorite applications on their phones. Similarly, designers repeat the same process of stage two to get the laddering of these applications.

Step 6.

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Designers should prepare case cards to help introduce the cases (Do’s - 2)

There will be several cases introduced by designers. If there doesn’t have any tools help participants memorize the characteristics of these cases, they can’t do well on the stage of grouping and comparing. Thus, designers should prepare case cards with the pictures and main attributes on them.

Not every chain can end up in a value, but always give a try (Do’s - 3)

Sometimes participants can’t express their feelings very clearly, and sometimes they just refuse to open out due to the privacy. Designers should explain the aim of the research in the beginning to ensure participants’ privacy, and help them express themselves by changing the way of asking.

Don’t pre-set the type of applications that presented by participants (Don’ts – 1) Designers can’t forecast the applications that participants want to present, there always have some surprising findings through the interview, and it can be an opportunity for your design. So don’t expect and pre-set the type according to the product you are designing for.

Encourage participants share the negative feelings about the applications (Do’s - 3) There are few negative feelings expressed in the stage of presenting the applications on participants’ phones. They always focused on how much they love the application, and ignore that it still has some weak points can related to negative consequences.

So, don’t forget to lead them to share shortcomings actively.

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step3. Sorting consequences by Affinity diagram

After conducting interviews, designers should take actions on integrating consequences before laddering.

To do the Affinity diagram to systematize all the feelings (Do’s - 4)

Designers will get a lot of consequences from interviews. The best way to systematize these feelings is to do the Affinity diagram, which sorts the feelings by considering their meanings, and picks one from a group as the representative for the next step.

Sometimes, if there are too many kinds of values in similarity, we do the sorting for them too.

Too many layers of consequences bring complexity to the study (Don’ts - 2)

After sorting all the feelings, designers should consider how many layers it will have in a ladder. We suggest applying two layers for functional consequences and

emotional consequences are the best.

Instead of the suggestion of six levels in the means-end chain from Walker and Olson’s (see Table 2-1), we combine abstract attributes and functional attributes into the layer of functional consequences, which represents the feelings that provided by products, and extract psychological consequence and instrumental value as the layer of emotional consequences to present feelings related to users’ percept. For the reason that you need to restructure the massive resources from two different HVMs in the next step, two layers for consequences is a preferred and easier structure.

Step 4. Crossing the HVMs

Designers should deal with three HVMs from different subjects in the process of attaining proposed HVM, P-HVM, for application design. One is from the field that

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you are designing for; in this case, it’s the HVM of wellness from the wellness service cases we prepared. The second one is from the applications you aim to, for example, we picked two existing wellness applications in this study. The last one is the HVM of applications that participants shared during interviews (see Fig 5-5). At the same time, you can also build a set of negative HVMs as reference for design.

Fig 5-5 the process of HVMs crossing

Crossing the HVMs by emotional consequences (Do’s - 5)

Since the functional and emotional purposes presented in chapter 3, designers should extract the part of “Emotional consequences -> Values” of HVMs, which belong to the aimed field cases and applications, and extract the part of “Functional consequences -> Emotional consequences” of HVMs, from applications presented by participants and the applications of aimed field designers prepared. In addition, use the emotional consequences repeatedly show up in both extractions as key nodes to combine two parts together as a P-HVM for design (see Fig 5-5).

Attributes of the field you design for

Functional Consequences

Emotional Consequences

Values in the field

Attributes of other

Values in the APPs

Attributes of the

Values in the field

Functional Consequences

Emotional Consequences

Values in the field

Wellness HVM

APPs HVM Wellness APPs

HVM P-HVM

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The matrix is a suggested way to present a consolidated HVM (Do’s - 6)

In fact, after the consolidation, the P-HVM will be very complex, which is too hard to read by other designers who didn’t participate in the research stage but join in the design progress. Thus, integrate HVMs into the matrix (see Appendix C) and extract the part designers concern about to build a P-HVM in a small scale is the clearer way to present important information.

Step 5. Arranging the quantitative survey

There will be several routes to reach a single value or a consequence. The situation makes designers confused that which one is the more important way to attain users’ values. Hence, we suggest delivering the questionnaire based on the routes of P-HVM to get the weights on it when designers need to make choices from these options (see Appendix D).

Give the rights for participants to skip the question (Do’s - 7)

The questionnaire will be a little hard for some participants. Because the design of the questionnaire is based on the participants’ output from interviews, but most of the participants who answering the questionnaire aren’t in the same context with the formers. Thus, it’s predictable that they will feel confused toward some questions, and we should serve them rights to skip it, and also prevent the invalid data.

Step 6. Conducting workshop or brainstorming

After building up the P-HVM designer can arrange the workshop or

brainstorming to deliver the corresponding design factors that match the design specification that functional consequences offer.

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