Designing for Value: Insights from the Emotional Appraisal Approach to Understanding User Value

Value is increasingly understood as the entity that is proposed by companies and determined by users. Then, how can design facilitate the user-led value determination process? The overall value creation mechanism includes two elements: co-creating service experiences and evaluating service experiences. While designers have actively studied the former by applying human-centred design research to understanding unique and contextual user experiences, they lack insights into the latter. This study takes an emotional appraisal approach to understand users’ value determination process of a library service and illustrates how the approach can contribute to designing for user value. Based on the insights, a model for systematic user-centric design approaches to better support the overall value creation process is proposed.