An elicitation technique for customer emotional requirements based on multi-sensory user experience

Satisfying customer's emotional preferences is the key to success in the new product design and development. In this regard, the semantic differential scale is a very efficient way to collect and analyse customer's subjective impression. It helps customers to express their attitudes through a list of words such as excited and enjoyment. This method, however, could be improved by a few fresh perspectives. Firstly, the semantic items often came from an ad-hoc project, and might not be appropriate because of individual differences. Secondly, it was assumed that customers seeing a product image can recall their feelings while human emotions are evoked by multi-sensory perceptions in a real life scenario. Some words, comfortable for instance, might be only triggered when you have the physical contact with the product. Designers named it as the actual product quality, the actual experience in a human-product interaction. This work therefore aims at investigating the elicitation technique to handle the nature of user experience, such as multimodality and expression preferences. Forty female road cyclists have provided their attitudes of positive emotions towards cycling following by an actual product quality evaluation of two bicycle saddles. The results showed the effect of personal involvement on a semantic differential scale and how users perceived certain Kansei words under different interactions, viz., vision, touch and cycling. Finally, the proposed elicitation technique could help manufacturers to build the design requirement based on customer's emotional preferences before pushing it into the target market.