ReseaRch MethoD 29 desirability Testing When there is disagreement about which design direction to pursue, desirability testing shifts the conversation from which design is "best" to which design elicits the optimal emotional response from users. First impressions matter, and within seconds of being introduced to a product, people will make judgments about it. Most of the snap judgments are based on how design elements make people feel, and designers know that interface elements that trigger an emotional response are difficult for non-designers to identify and articulate. But there is a method designed to explore this emo- tional space--desirability testing. desirability testing goes beyond helping teams to simply identify the "best" or "most popular" aesthetic design direction. Instead, it explores the effective response that different designs elicit from people, so that the team can focus design efforts on shaping the exact emotional response they want people to have while using their products. desirability testing provides people a way to identify and articulate how a design makes them feel. It accomplishes this by providing participants with a range of positive, neutral, and negative adjectives that help them to tell the story of their experience 1 using simple, handheld tools--index cards with adjectives written on them. To begin, write each adjective/descriptive phrase on its own index card, and place all of the cards randomly on a table. Show participants a prototype mock-up, and ask them to pick the 3, 4, or 5 adjectives that best describes how they feel about the design. record their selec- tions, and ask the participant to talk about what each card means to them as it relates to the design. 1. desirability testing was first developed at Microsoft and documented by Joey Benedek and Trish Miner in their UPA 2002 paper "Measuring desirability: new Methods for Measuring desirability in the Usability lab Setting." The adjectives and phrases they used to run their studies were chosen from market research, prior user research, and team brainstorming, and were selected to align with specific project goals. Barnum, Carol M., and laura A. Palmer. "More Than a Feeling: Understanding the desirability Factor in User experience." proceedings of chi 2010 (2010): 4703­4715. 2. See note 1 (Barnum and Palmer) above. 3. Hawley, Michael. "rapid desirability Testing: