Emotional mental model

The design of User Experience (UX) demands the consideration of expectations and remembrance on the product use. We think of mental models (widely used in usability) as being a good approach to influence expectations, although emotional aspects are not considered so far. In this paper we introduce the concept of Emotional Mental Models and corresponding product descriptions to help researchers, designers, customers and other stakeholders in UX design process anticipating experiences and communicating the emotional impact. These representations need to be rather image-based focusing the emotional description coming from users´ motives instead of a technology-driven perspective. We discuss storytelling and metaphors as suitable representations to create shared Emotional Mental Models. Furthermore, we describe the deficit of representations in design practice and the potential to enrich engineering design by appropriate illustrations.