We went into the field and spent time with people as they used their cool products using our industry-leading process, Contextual Design. We talked with 65 people between the ages of 15-60 across multiple locations in the US. We asked them to introduce us to their “cool stuff”: iPhones, BlackBerries, iPads, Facebook, community sites, DVRs, TV’s, digital cameras—whatever they thought was cool. We watched them use their cool things, talked about how they choose these products, their initial experiences with the products, and the impact of the products on their lives. We also talked about things that once were cool but were cool no more.

We brought all that data back and interpreted it, consolidated it, and looked for patterns. To help us understand it all, we built affinity diagrams, looking at patterns across the lives of our participants. We identified personas showing how people orient to technology—and how their reactions change across age. We created device personas representing the experience of certain cool devices. And we developed activity boards representing how cool things were used in peoples’ lives for key activities like listening to music, getting news, managing time, maintaining good health and staying connected to friends and family.

This process led us to the discovery of joy as the heart of the cool experience. And we discovered what leads to joy, embodied in the Wheel of Joy and the Triangle of Design.

Then, to check our thinking, we conducted a survey with over 800 people in multiple cities to see if some of our Cool Concepts were more important than others—and how they changed with age.

Today we continue to refine our concepts and to extend them to understand how the Cool Concepts work in business settings – and how to make the design implications real to product makers and designers alike.