Aspirational toilet user experiences: translating latent user needs into aspirational user experiences.

What makes a product user experience aspirational? What do people truly want from their products? The aim of this research is to assess the implementation of latent needs to design an innovative aspirational product user experience. The thesis details reflective action-based research on the study of the design of an aspirational toilet user experience; a taboo subject that has little to no aspiration attributed to it. Toilets have not changed in the past 200 years and arguably the user experience is not considered aspirational. The reflections on an admittedly extreme case could in turn have implications for the other practitioners. Latent needs were elicited from 77 households in Kumasi Ghana to understand the motivations for acquiring a toilet while latent needs of the user experience were gathered from hackers online. The results suggest that the negative ‘shut away’ nature of a toilet means people do not attribute value to them while there is a universal fear of the invisibility of disease. The study resulted in the construction of a wellbeing monitoring toilet prototype that would change the meaning people attribute to toilets while beginning to satisfy the fear of disease. A final test was arranged where the improved user experience is shown to be more valuable and aspirational to users by questionnaire because the new concept affords new meaning beyond the utility that toilets currently provide. The reflections on the case study suggest that when implementing latent needs in the design of an aspirational product user experience, it is worth considering that what users say is not what they do and meaning is a dimension of innovation that is as important as technology.