How to Impress Your User: Guideline for Designing the Product Impression

The development of products requires considering multiple—partially contradictory—aspects (e.g. manufacture, usability, costs etc.). “Design for X” (X is replaced by the specific aspect) guidelines meet this challenge; however, there is a deficit of effective “Design for Emotion” approaches. We present a guideline with product parameters and design principles taken from engineering literature and enrich them with product impressions answering: How shall the product appear? Which emotions shall the design cause? We determine the dependencies between these elements and illustrate them in a figurative and usable way. By applying the guideline (engineering and industrial) designers can systematically vary parameters by applying adequate design principles to create a specific impression. This supports the emotional design of products caused by visual appearance.