User Experience Design at Sony Ericsson - Introducing the Virtual Pet

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4. Method Sony Ericsson’s current user centered design process will be used as a structure that designers can relate to during development of the virtual pet concept. The process presently serves as a framework, toolbox, or support for interaction design and usability activities within software development projects. It stems from the usability engineering tradition and it is therefore interesting to see to what degree the process encourages design for other qualities of use than efficiency and effectiveness. As noted earlier, usability engineering has traditionally laid emphasis on qualitative measurements, and it is not clear if this approach is the preferable one when developing experience-based applications. 4 The five phases of the current design process that will be used in the development of the virtual pet concept. The development of the virtual pet concept will not incorporate the whole process; rather, focus will be on the vision, user profiling and evaluation phases, as these are assumed to be the most critical parts for presenting and evaluating the virtual pet concept. Furthermore, the initial phases can be seen as tone setting and might therefore capture the current design philosophy at the company. Goal and Task analysis will be touched upon briefly, to see if these phases are relevant when designing an experience-based application. Chapter 5 of this paper will contain both the first phases of practical design of the virtual pet concept, as well as theoretical reflections on the process.
5. Designing the Virtual Pet Concept In a recent survey conducted in the UK, three-quarters of mobile phone owners claimed that they would rather hand their wallets over to muggers than lose their precious communication devices (Farrell 2002). The mobile telephone is one of the few technologies that most of us bring along wherever we go. A new, high tech device has accompanied wallet, keys and watch. In the past decade, we have created an appliance that in the following decade will be carried around by more than a billion people daily. As noted, some of these people are so fond of their mobiles that it may well be that they rather lose their wallet than their phones. This use quality could be described as emotional attachment, something not taken into account in traditional usability, but definitely a quality that is desired in any consumer product. To further increase the emotional attachment that users have for their phones, the exploration of a virtual pet concept is suggested - an application that will let users care for a virtual pet living in their phone. What is a Virtual Pet? The first virtual pet to be known worldwide was the Tamagotchi, introduced by Japanese Bandai in November 1996. The Tamagotchi – directly translated as “egg friend” – is a simple key chain gadget with a small, black and white LCD-screen. On the screen lives a virtual creature that the owner has to care for and feed. If s/he succeeds in doing this, a lovable creature will evolve with its own, unique, personality. The Tamagotchi was a massive success in Japan, with 4 million units sold the first year. In 1997, the gadget was introduced in the states, selling 20,000 units the first day. The Tamagotchi, a key chain virtual pet. Since the launch of the original Tamagotchi more complex virtual pets have also been created; recent products include Nintendo’s virtual Pokemon characters, Sega’s Seaman and Sony’s PostPet (Kusahara 2000). In this paper, the term “virtual pet” refers to a digital creature that lives a virtual life on a physical screen. A virtual pet has some degree of autonomy and animation, and may be dependent on a caretaker to survive. 5
Page 1: User Experience Design at Sony Eric
Page 4 and 5: © Copyright 2002, Simon Lessing Ba
Page 7: Acknowledgement I’d like to thank
Page 11 and 12: 1. Introduction In traditional usab
Page 13: 3. Objectives The goals of this pap
Page 17 and 18: Why Should Sony Ericsson Consider D
Page 19 and 20: Business Viability It is of great i
Page 21 and 22: Who Wants a Virtual Pet? The first
Page 23 and 24: Some of the virtual pet sketches. A
Page 25 and 26: 5.4 Goal and Task Definition Moving
Page 27 and 28: 6. User Experience Frameworks What
Page 29 and 30: Alben - Quality of Experience Alben
Page 31 and 32: To identify opportunities, ethnogra
Page 33 and 34: Forlizzi & Ford - The Building Bloc
Page 35 and 36: Shedroff - A Unified Field Theory o
Page 37 and 38: Flexible Permitting use by people w
Page 39 and 40: 7. Recent Evaluation Methods Curren
Page 41 and 42: Bendek & Miner - Measuring Desirabi
Page 43 and 44: Hassenzahl et al - Engineering Joy
Page 45 and 46: 8. Discussion One of the objectives
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Page 49 and 50: Hynninen, T., Liukkonen-Olmiala, T.
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User Experience Design at Sony Ericsson - Introducing the Virtual Pet

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