Jinsop Lee, an industrial designer, believed that great design appeals to all five senses. He called this, the Five Senses Theory. Jinsop also gave a Ted talk on this topic long time ago. According to him, one can grade any experience on all five senses. For e.g, you can grade eating noodles on sight, smell, touch, taste and sound. Similarly, you can grade your biking experience. Jinsop graded himself on a bunch of adventure experiences like bungee jumping, playing games on two different consoles and others. The five senses graph for Jinsop’s experience on Nintendo Wii against older gaming consoles is displayed below. This clearly tells which gaming console he preferred.
This Five Senses theory can be applied to User Experience Testing too. Users can be asked to review the applications under test and map them on a scale of 1-10 on all five senses. The broader the area covered, the better the experience. Further, this theory can be customized to rate the applications at features level or flow level. The Flow example below describes user’s experience when he was using (learning) the app ‘X’ for the first time.
The Feature example below shows how the user felt about ‘Seen’ feature on Facebook Chat window.
Several such experiments can be performed with users/testers to understand how different senses respond to different scenarios in applications. Like any other framework driven by individuals, Five senses theory has its limitations too:
- It varies from person to person as everyone’s senses may not work the same way.
- All senses may not be applicable for all people. For some specially abled people, they may not even be able to hear or see.
- It is hard to implement on large sets of users
- For some products, all senses may not be applicable. For example, how do you rate this article for taste using this theory?
Despite its drawbacks, Five Senses Theory is a good technique to understand how products can be designed by cracking into the pulse of users.
Have you tried a similar approach before?
