Sensory importance and emotions at early stage of product experiences - A qualitative study of juice squeezer

Users build up their product experiences through all senses. To understand how these senses work together, how their importance change through time, and how senses evoke positive and negative emotions would be very helpful for designers to create more pleasant user experiences and improve user's evaluation about the product. In the study, we base on Fenko et al.'s study (2010) and use three qualitative methods (observations, interviews, and diaries) to gather more detailed information from a female participant about the early stage of product usage, which is the key period for a user to evaluate a product. We ask participant to squeeze juice with an electric juicer for a month. We then discuss the multisensory experiences, the sensory dominance, and emotions evoked by senses at six different usage stages during the month. The results suggest that vision is the most important sense when participant getting familiar with the product. However, the importance of each sense changes right at the first time of operation. Later from the first week to the fourth week of usage, touch becomes the most important sense, which is related to the main function of the product. Also, emotions evoked by senses are very likely to affect the importance of each sense. In this case, we find the emotional feelings of touch are unsatisfied and neglected. This reminds us most of the designers today still focus most on vision but little on other senses. Designers should pay more attention to which sense plays the most important role at different stages and try to bring users more positive emotions and experiences.