Samsung EQ — Emotional UX · Samsung PRISM
Four months asking what actually makes someone bond with a phone — and turning the answer into a framework a design team can use.
Overview
Samsung's ask was unusually open. Not "fix this screen" — but work out what attributes of a digital experience actually evoke emotion, positive or negative, and what creates the bond between a person and their device: visual, animation, haptic, sound, feedback. Then find the gaps in satisfaction, and define new guidelines for mobile interactions with worked examples. An open brief is a gift and a trap — the work only counts if it lands on something a team can actually pick up and use.
Highlights
- Read the theory before touching a screen: Don Norman's three levels, emotion as a cognitive process, and Freud's model of consciousness — the last of which quietly became the framework's second axis.
- Put a ballot box where students actually walk: "I wish my phone could…" — boxes at the registration desk and the library, plus write-on boards, a survey, and worksheets.
- Two research tracks, one overlap: Five themes from desk research, six from primary. Two appeared in both: connection and consciousness. That intersection became the thesis.
- Eight principles, sorted by what triggers them: Serendipity, assurance, nostalgia, rewarding, familiarity, control, closure, connection — grouped as core, emotional, or functional.
- A framework you can plot a journey on: Each principle crossed with a level of consciousness, so an existing journey and an improved one can be drawn on the same wheel and compared.
Process
- Understand human behaviour: Desk research into what emotional design means, the existing principles and frameworks, and what is known about Gen Z as an audience.
- Develop empathy towards the target audience: Primary research on campus — ballot boxes, open boards, a survey, and worksheets that asked people to associate words and images with their phone.
- Create a framework that validates evaluation: Turn the recurring themes into named principles, then structure them so a journey can be assessed against them rather than described loosely.
- Evaluate emotional triggers: Walk a real journey — homescreen customisation — stage by stage, marking which sense is active and which principle is firing at each step.
- Create emotion-specific visualisations: Plot the journey as it exists against the journey as it could be, so the gap is visible rather than argued.
Research
A conscious effort to stay connected — to the outside world and to their own emotions — is what drives the attachment. Not the hardware, and not any single feature. That sentence is what the rest of the work is built on.
Principles
- Connection (Emotional): Attachment with other people or objects, through the device.
- Assurance (Functional): Affirmation, or guarantee — the system telling you it heard you.
- Nostalgia (Core): The emotional take-me-backs — memory surfaced rather than stored.
- Closure (Emotional): A sense of completion — knowing the thing is finished.
- Rewarding (Functional): A productive feeling. Achievement, however small the task.
- Serendipity (Emotional): Exploring new things that lead to an unexpected positive reaction.
- Familiarity (Core): A sense of relatedness to real-world scenarios and objects.
- Control (Functional): The ability to perform a task according to your own preference.
Outcome
A vocabulary and a method for a conversation design teams usually have in adjectives.
- 8 — Principles, each traced to research rather than literature
- 3 — Levels of consciousness as the second axis
- 24 — Positions a journey stage can occupy
- 4 — Months, from desk research to final presentation
These describe the shape of the work, not its impact. The programme concluded in a framework and a final presentation to Samsung — there is no validated before-and-after metric here, and none is claimed. A fixed four-month deadline also kept the research scoped to what the team could run in that window.
Role
Project lead · researcher and designer · September – December · Four students, Samsung PRISM with MIT Institute of Design, Pune
- Led the project end to end — direction, sequencing, and the final presentation
- Built the framework: the eight principles crossed with levels of consciousness
- Ran the field research in the foyer — ballot boxes, open boards, worksheets
- Held the stakeholder relationship with Samsung through review cycles
- Synthesis of the desk and primary tracks into the named principles
Skills
- Research
- Emotional Design
- Mobile
- Framework