UNBOX YOUR CONFIDENCE

An Interactive Box that Applies Elementary Concepts to Elicit Confidence

Confidence is the feeling of being certain about something. We used this definition to drive our design process to create the interaction for our box.

My team was challenged to design and build an interactive box that elicits a particular emotion (confidence) in the user when opened, taking into consideration how the user might feel about the box, about the process of opening it, and most importantly, about themselves when they experience this interaction.

Designing Product Interactions, Northwestern University, Fall 2018

DESIGN CONCEPT

To elicit the feeling of confidence, we decided to emulate the conceptual model of a child’s shape matching toy and considered how people use intuition to match shapes to fit an object into a similarly shaped hole.

We explored elements that would allow a user to feel confident in discovering a new product:

Affordances

How might we manipulate the form of components to suggest ways of interacting with the box?

Signifiers

How might we integrate visual indicators to further suggest possible interactions with the box?

Mapping

How might we best place interacting components on the box to assure clarity of use?

Feedback

How might we provide visual and/or audial feedback to inform on result of interaction?

Through this thought process, we designed our box to open with multiple keys. Each key is a different geometrically-shaped object that fits to a corresponding “keyhole". Each key matched to its keyhole incrementally unlocks the box, plays an affirmative sound, and triggers a light until all keys are matched and the box is open.

Inside the box, we added additional elements to extend the experience of feeling confident.