Color Preferences in Household Appliances: Data for Emotional Design

Abstract

“Soft” ergonomics includes emotional needs and other qualitative aspects which affect the relationship of the user to the product .[1] Within this field fall likes or dislikes of a product as far as its color is concerned.This study included 52 volunteers unaffected by color blindness, 28 female and 24 male, ranging in age from 18 to 53, with an average age of 22.9 years.The experimental stimuli (nine chromatic and three achromatic) were applied to six different appliances. All of them were presented on a computer screen, one at a time, in random order. A continuous scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 100 (very much) indicated to what extent the viewer liked the image. In general, for all the electric appliances, a greater preference was found for achromatic colors, especially white (77.2) and black (73.7), with similar scores. Even gray (58.5) surpassed the most preferred chromatic color, which was blue, with a score of 46.9.These findings suggest the need to obtain data about color preferences for specific products in order to satisfy the requirements of pleasurable design.