Emotion by Design : An exploration of evoking ‘relief’ through a mobile app

Kurr is a foodtech startup developing a mobile app with the purpose of answering the question “what to eat?”. The company has built a brand identity in order to stand out among the more than 5,7 apps available in the biggest mobile app markets. As a part of the brand identity, the company aims to implement the emotion of ‘relief’ in the interactions between the app and its users. A unique attribute of ‘relief’ is that it must always appear immediately after some other aroused emotion. The objective of this study was to examine if it is possible to evoke ‘relief’ through a mobile app. Design thinking was the method applied in this study. The method has a big focus on the human, the users of the app in this case, by conducting interviews and user testing throughout the whole process. Phases of generating a big amount of ideas have alternated with phases of filtering out the best ones. To trigger the emotion of ‘relief’, the user flow was split into the following steps; 1. make it easy to get started, 2. motivate to keep on and charge up ‘joy’, 3. generate a climax of the preceding emotion, and 4. evoke the feeling of ‘relief. These steps were then implemented in a prototype. The prototype was later tested and the test results did not show evidence of how the emotion of ‘relief’ can be evoked through a mobile app, but it suggested that the result could differ if the tests were conducted in a real-life situation instead of a test environment. The research showed a significant result that the emotion of ‘joy’ was evoked when interacting with the prototype. The validity of the result should be further investigated though, with new user tests in a real-life environment and with a higher number of participants.