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
Two independent tracks — one from the literature, one from real Gen Z on campus — landed on the same two themes. That convergence is what validated the thesis: 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