| In the era of diverse requirements, designing needs to be considered not only from factors like product modeling, materials, function and others, but also needs to start from the angle of users' requirements. Users' requirements are the final foothold of product's development and manufacturing, and purchase or not will determine the success of the product. Traditional methods of user researching adopts language and words to get the users'superficial information. Compared with it, Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) is a kind of research method which uses visual metaphor to explore people's inner thoughts and feelings deeply.By analyzing the phenomenon of the users' potential requirements and ZMET, this paper has optimized the ZMET by introducing MEC and presented a more suitable research method for the potential users' requirements. In this paper, the author studied the demands of intelligent refrigerator, based on ZMET Technology. Firstly,8 respondents screened by Revised PII were asked to find out the pictures. They were required to find out pictures to meet the feelings and thoughts of intelligent refrigerator based on the research theme. Secondly, the designer guided the respondents to say the true inner ideas and the coupling relationship between ideas. Thirdly, by analyzing of interviewed materials with MEC, this paper developed how respondents get outcomes of function and psychology based on the relevant attributes of the products. In the end, it will prove the value oriented function of intelligent refrigerator to end-users.Finally, product designers will develop rich emblematic tradition by combining ZMET and MEC and stimulate product design creativity. It is the value oriented symbols that serves as the creative foundation for product designers. A complete usability study path established based on ZMET can help the products satisfy user's mental model easier, and then improve the overall availability of products and realize humanized design. |
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