Development of a self-design system for greeting cards on the basis of interactive evolutionary computation

Purpose – User-centered product designs have been attracting increasing attention, particularly in digital design. In interacting with the design support system, designers may face problems such as changing demands (e.g. unclear demands) and insufficient descriptions of these demands (e.g. data scarcity). The purpose of this paper is to build a design support system prototype for demonstrating the feasibility of meeting the high involvement of users in digital products. Design/methodology/approach – Interactive evolutionary computation is applied. Findings – A prototype of self-design greeting card system (SDGCS) was proposed. It provides professional design layouts, offers users numerous self-design models, and allows nonprofessional users to easily design greeting cards. The results of this study show that users were satisfied with the functionality, usefulness, and ease-of-use of the SDGCS. Research limitations/implications – This study used digital card design as an example for demonstrating the feasibility of satisfying the unclear needs of uses, enabling users to design a digital card creatively and complete their designs quickly. However, the current system only supports the design of static objects and layout of card. And the evaluation sample size was small, which might affect generalizability of the findings. Practical implications – In practice, greeting card web operators can image the feasible business models by providing the attraction of self-design functionalities. Originality/value – In current human-centric marketing era, consumers have begun to request interaction with designers in creating the value of a product. However, very few previous studies have provided support for digital product self-design. This study demonstrated the feasibility of satisfying the needs of self-design.