Evaluating emotional response to products: The case of dishwashers

Abstract

As the online shopping market proliferates, designers are pushed to start designing for pre-use user experience, focusing on how the user experiences the product during online shopping, namely before actual use. The goal of this study is to provide input to design professionals, helping them to design for pre-use user experience, in other words, design for products sold in the online shopping market. This study sheds light on pre-use user experience by proposing a questionnaire-based method investigating the \"affect\" dimension of UX. Throughout the study, following two pilot studies and an optimization process, 7 dimensions, which can be rated on a 5-point Likert scale, are generated to assess the emotional response to the dishwasher samples. While proposing a self-reported, practical, cost-efficient, quantifiable method to evaluate the \"affect\" dimension in UX, this study also posits a framework that can be used to adapt the method to other product genres.