adidas material emotive modeler
Case Study: A research-oriented project to design a tool for Adidas designers that can aligns emotive responses to product materials.
Make it stand out.
the project
The goal was to understand the intrinsic, subjective, and emotional responses to different materials and their material attributes. During the material selection part of the Adidas shoe design process, designers rely extensively on intuition and experience. We were asked to quantify the emotive responses to materials and design a solution to help Adidas shoe designers and engineers make informed, research-driven decisions during shoe development to increase consumer satisfaction.
the outcome
We designed EMMA, the Emotive Modeler Material Attributes tool. Based on our research, usability findings, and the EMMA prototype, Adidas has decided to fund this work and continue to pursue it internally.
my role
UI/UX Designer
Project Manager
Researcher
I primarily worked on UI/UX design, prototyping, and usability testing. I also served as project manager to create the timeline and milestones for the 6-month project.
This work was sponsored by Adidas and completed as part of the Human-Centered Design & Engineering MS program at the University of Washington.
A Two-Part Process
Part I: Background research and qualitative research with consumers to capture data about their emotive responses to materials provided by Adidas.
Part II: Research, design, and testing with Adidas designers/engineers as the intended users of the tool.
Make it stand out.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
CONSUMER PARTICIPANT STUDY
For each of the 39 materials, participants would touch and manipulate the swatch and then describe how the material physically felt and how it made them emotionally feel. In addition to think aloud responses, we used word association to map materials to emotions from our word bank. This allowed us to cross-examine any emotional responses that may have been changed from their online survey response.
The stages of the participant study emulates a consumer’s typical purchasing pattern.
METHODS
BACKGROUND RESEARCH
Literature review
Comparative analysis
Trend analysis
CONSUMER RESEARCH
Broad online survey (using Mechanical Turk)
Word association
Think aloud
Participant Interview
Make it stand out.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
PROTOTYPING + USABILITY STUDIES
We performed a total of two rounds of usability studies, both moderated and unmoderated with six Adidas designers and material engineers. The goal was to communicate the findings from the consumer research in a tool for the Adidas shoe development process. Using the input/output system of the algorithm as the base. We started ideation with paper prototypes before moving on to a Figma prototypes.
Due to a condensed timeline, we had to incorporate user research into our initial low-fidelity prototype usability study.
METHODS
Ideation & Paper prototyping
Prototyping (Figma)
Task-based usability study
Participant Interview