Gender and aesthetics: A study on preferences in product design

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.

This paper examines the effect of social exclusion and product design philosophy on consumers' design preference, its underlying mechanism, and boundary condition. We propose that rejected (vs. ignored) consumers should prefer a professional‐ (vs. user‐) designed product through increased psychological ownership. Additionally, product complexity should moderate this effect, such that rejected (vs. ignored) consumers should prefer professional‐designed products for low complexity products; for high‐complexity products, we predict a preference for professional‐designed products, regardless of consumers' state of social exclusion. Across four studies (including one using an incentive‐compatible design), we empirically test these hypotheses using different operationalizations of social exclusion. Our research contributes to the literature on product design philosophy, social exclusion, and psychological ownership. The findings offer novel insights regarding ways for marketers to develop marketing strategies to effectively choose and advertise firms' design philosophy.

A semantic differential study of designers’ and users’ product form perception

Determination of optimal product styles by ordinal logistic regression versus conjoint analysis for kitchen faucets

Crowdsourcing Augmented Reality Environment (CARE) for aesthetic evaluation of products in conceptual stage

PurposeThis study aims to integrate fall-protection function into the elderly clothing to meet both the daily life and fall-protection needs of the elderly people, thereby upgrading the performance of elderly clothing.Design/methodology/approachThis study identified the design strategies of elderly clothing using an Extended Kansei Engineering methodology. Extended Kansei Engineering methodology is a new design framework developed from the traditional Kansei Engineering methodology to meet the design requirements of the product-service system. This study focuses on the product section of product-service system design. According to the product design process of the Extended Kansei Engineering methodology, this study first collected and organized the design elements and Kansei words of elderly clothing. Then a questionnaire was designed using Semantic Differential Scale. Finally, the questionnaire survey was conducted and the collected data was analysed to understand the consumption preferences of elderly people. A total of 399 elderly people aged 65 and older provided valuable design insights for this survey.FindingsThe research findings include the product design strategies for the development of elderly clothing, as well as a product prototype canvas and a product prototype elderly clothing developed based on the design strategies.Practical implicationsThe research findings can provide competitive design strategies for the development of elderly clothing, thereby upgrading the performance of elderly clothing.Social implicationsThis elderly clothing integrates fall-protection function to reduce the risk of injury for elderly people due to falls, thereby helping society alleviate the medical and healthcare pressure caused by falls for elderly people.Originality/valueThe research findings can provide competitive design strategies for the development of elderly clothing. Furthermore, the Extended Kansei Engineering methodology introduced in this study can provide product and service designers with design methods that are more in line with the development trend of modern product-service system business models.

Purpose Converging visual behavioural and attentional allocation studies within neuroscience have shown culture influences the processing of visual information obtained from the visual field. While attending (reviewing) a visual scene, individuals from a collectivist culture attend more to the context (background) compared to those from an individualist culture who view more the focal object. This highlights the effect of cultural conditioning in terms of holistic and analytical processing of visual information. This study aimed to demonstrate these principles in the context of an assistive product, a wheelchair, highlighting the key visual elements of the form; and, how a congruent background (hospital room) or incongruent (athletics track) influenced cultural bias during visual processing and assigned meaning. Material and methods A combination of research methods (Semantic Differential Scale and eye-tracking) was used to triangulate the results. A total of 126 adult student participants, (Pakistani/collectivist, n = 57) and the (UK/individualist, n = 69), viewed a visual presentation of a wheelchair with semantically congruent and then an incongruent background and responded via an online questionnaire. A sub-sample completed the survey whilst monitored via eye-tracking. Results Pakistani respondents used shorter and less frequent fixations on the foreground compared to the responses of their counterparts (UK respondents). The wheel of the wheelchair was highlighted as the prominent form by both groups. Conclusion Results demonstrate a culture-influenced pattern of visual processing even when the product was displayed against a semantically incongruent background. The findings from this study also validate and extend the outcomes of similar studies revealing a more specific, yet consistent, cultural effect on individuals’ visual perception. Finally, the efficacy of triangulated research methods in their relationship to exploring the AT product’s semantics was discussed. IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION The knowledge of AT products’ semantics will be significant to investigate, for their improved social acceptance, particularly when considered from a diverse cultural standpoint. A model of best practice, focussing on semantics manipulation, will provide AT product designers, practitioners, and those involved in their marketing, Internationally, with a suitable process/tool to positively reframe the perception of these devices. Finally, this research will help product and industrial designers to consider cultural cognitive styles in the design of products for the better adoption of products within the global marketplace.

Do you really know your consumers? : analyzing the impact of consumer knowledge on use and failure evaluation of consumer electronics

This study aims to explore design methods that enhance the experience of security products for women living alone through the research of embodied emotion theory. Methods: First, the characteristics and behavioral patterns of women living alone are analyzed. Next, the current development of security products for women living alone is reviewed, along with an analysis of the significance of embodied emotion in the design of these products. Lastly, an online survey is used to conduct new product satisfaction tests to verify product feasibility. Results: A design strategy for security products for women living alone based on embodied emotion is proposed, and a specific security product for women living alone is designed. Conclusion: Applying embodied emotion in the design of security products for women living alone enhances their psychological closeness to these products. For the security products, this approach results in a more comprehensive demonstration of their functionality and value.

Purpose To explore the influence of listener profession on impressions of speakers with dysarthria with varying intelligibility using semantic differential scales. M ethod: Three listener groups (undergraduate students, emergency workers, speech–language pathologists (SLPs); n = 38) rated non-speech attributes of six adults with dysarthria that ranged from low to high speech intelligibility. Participants rated 22 bipolar adjective pairs and listening effort on visual analogue scales. Following factor analysis of the semantic differential scales, listener impression and effort ratings were compared across listening groups and speaker intelligibility. Result Repeated measures ANOVA revealed that neither impressions nor effort ratings differed across listener groups. However, impressions significantly decreased and listening effort significantly increased with reduced intelligibility. Analysis of the semantic differential scale items revealed two factors (Capability, Personality) that predicted 52% of the variance. Listener impressions were significantly higher for Personality than Capability. C onclusion: Preliminary findings suggest that speakers with dysarthria with reduced intelligibility are at risk to be negatively judged, particularly on their physical and mental capability. This study demonstrates the promise of employing semantic differential scales to investigate listener impressions and therefore the daily communication experiences of speakers with dysarthria. SLPs should consider patient experience of negative impressions when designing treatment.

Consumers’ affective responses (CARs) to the appearance of a product will greatly influence their purchasing decisions. In the product design field, researchers often provide adjectives so that consumers can express their subjective feelings. However, there exists both similarity and vagueness among these adjectives, which make it difficult to choose suitable adjectives for semantic differential (SD) experiments. This study proposes an approach based on factor analysis (FA), hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) and k-means clustering. First, an SD experiments is conducted to collect CARs evaluated data about a series of selected product samples. Second, FA is applied to the CARs data to extract the factor loadings of the adjectives. Finally, the clustering approach, which comprises HCA and k-means clustering, is used to group these adjectives according to the factor loading results obtained from the FA. A case study of mobile phone design is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Three representative pairwise adjectives: coarse-delicate, unoriginal-creative and discordant-harmonious were obtained from the experimental results conducted on the initial set of 22 pairwise adjectives. This proposed method is very helpful to product designers during new product development. keywords:Factor analysis、Hierarchical cluster analysis、K-means clustering、Kansei engineering、Product design.

The evaluation standard of product design is different for people, region, environment, which affected by many factors, especially the coordination between aesthetics and Ergonomics. Only by coordinating their relationship rationally can highlight its advantage in market competition. This article mainly discusses how to coordinate the relationship between aesthetics and ergonomics in product design, particularly the coordination process in which the process and basic elements of product design based on the case of Modeling Design in Self-express Service System Based on the University City. Finally we try to put forward an evaluation standard of product quality and a method of coordinating aesthetics and Ergonomics. Although this is just a tentative research, it will make a great role in promoting product design in the future. Introduction Nowadays, people‟s demands for product have been changed. Consumers‟ demands for product have changed from pursuit of humanization to satisfaction of usability and aesthetics. How to coordinate the relationship between aesthetics and ergonomics in product design? In terms of different types of products, the focal point of research is different. Household products pay attention to practical function and consumers always choose things which is safe, convenient and comfortable; In order to satisfy different customer‟s demands, car design not only focus on safety and comfort but also the sense of modeling beauty. Aesthetics and Ergonomics in product design Product design process The concept of “design” has appeared in ancient times. But “design” in this paper derived from English word, which means invention and creation. Product design covers the whole process of idea propose, generation, formation, product molding and finally putting into use (refer with: Fig. 1). The core of product design is functional structure. The coordination of form, material and color can increase the product popularity. Therefore, rationally coordinate their relationship can design a perfect product. International Conference on Economic Management and Trade Cooperation (EMTC 2014) © 2014. The authors Published by Atlantis Press 46 Figure 1 Product design process Demands of product design Consumers‟ understanding of product starts with vision, audition and any other sense. And then they know more about the function and connotation through the use. Therefore, users‟ demands for product not only include function but also other four aspects as following: functional requirements, usability requirements, ergonomics requirements, aesthetics requirements and symbolic requirements. Functional requirements Functionality is aim at the use of consumers. They purchase the product mainly for its functions. Functional requirements are the core demand of products [1]. Generally speaking, functional requirements go throughout the whole design process. Consumers understand the product features by using and finally decide whether to buy it. Usability requirements Usability is taken into consideration after functionality is satisfied. It requires product convenient and quick to use. Different line, shape, color, size etc respectively represent different implications and consumer can judge its semantics according to the comparison. Figure 2 Comparison of good and bad product semantics Pay attention to the comparison of good and poor product semantics as shown in Figure 2. The former handle use the curve to make users judge the handheld part; the latter switch may let the users confused that which orientation corresponds to on or off. Thus it can be seen that reasonable product form can satisfy consumer‟s demands for usability. Ergonomics requirements The main purpose of ergonomics is to ensure safety and comfort. In general, improve product operation efficiency [2]. User is the main point of product design. The mixture of ergonomics makes

Visual attention mechanisms play a crucial role in human perception and aesthetic evaluation. Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in computer vision tasks, yet their alignment with human visual attention patterns remains underexplored, particularly in aesthetic contexts. This study investigates the correlation between human visual attention and ViT attention mechanisms when evaluating handcrafted objects. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 30 participants (9 female, 21 male, mean age 24.6 years) who viewed 20 artisanal objects comprising basketry bags and ginger jars. Using a Pupil Labs eye-tracker, we recorded gaze patterns and generated heatmaps representing human visual attention. Simultaneously, we analyzed the same objects using a pre-trained ViT model with DINO (Self-DIstillation with NO Labels), extracting attention maps from each of the 12 attention heads. We compared human and ViT attention distributions using four complementary metrics—Kullback-Leibler divergence, Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient (CC), and Similarity (SIM)—across varying Gaussian parameters (), yielding 1,152,000 distance evaluations. Additionally, we performed Areas of Interest (AOI) analysis to quantify ViT attention concentration within object regions. Statistical analysis revealed optimal correlation at , with attention head #12 showing the strongest alignment with human visual patterns across all metrics. Significant differences were found between attention heads, with heads #7 and #9 demonstrating the greatest divergence from human attention (), Tukey HSD test). AOI analysis confirmed that all ViT heads concentrated attention significantly more within object regions than background areas (), with heads #12, #1, and #3 achieving lift values of +30 to +40 percentage points. Results indicate that while ViTs exhibit more global attention patterns compared to human focal attention, certain attention heads can approximate human visual behavior, particularly for specific object features like buckles in basketry items. These findings suggest potential applications of ViT attention mechanisms in product design and aesthetic evaluation, while highlighting fundamental differences in attention strategies between human perception and current AI models.

Usability evaluation is one of the essential aspects of software production. This evaluation should be done during the entire life cycle of a software application, from pre-production to production and post-production. However, the collection and evaluation of usability data can be a very challenging, time-consuming, and expensive task to be conducted manually, particularly for certain types of products and working conditions. These challenges may include the need to recruit participants fully engage and motivate them during evaluation, and factor in environmental conditions. Other challenges may include collecting data in real-world environments, especially when the users are geographically dispersed, minimizing evaluator and participant bias, and analyzing complex data sets, particularly when the volume of data is large. This research explores an alternative approach to automate the whole process of usability evaluation by utilizing data mining and machine learning techniques on data recorded in log files. The objective of this dissertation is to extract the value of usability-related metrics from user interactions and estimate usability measures in a quantitative manner. The use of log files for usability evaluation offers several advantages over traditional methods of evaluation, such as collecting data objectively without the need for subjective interpretation of the evaluator in some cases, creating a comprehensive view of user interactions with the possibility of identifying user behavioral patterns and trends that appear in large data sets, and collecting data from real-world scenarios instead of data from simulated scenarios. Other advantages include reducing evaluation costs, enabling remote data collection from anywhere in the world, which leads to the identification of location-dependent usability problems, and facilitating continuous monitoring over time, which leads to the identification of time-dependent usability issues. In this dissertation, Chapter II provides a comprehensive categorization, comparison, and summary of the pertinent usability evaluation techniques that utilize log files as input data in both academic and industrial research. Each method is examined carefully, and its respective strengths and weaknesses are highlighted to provide a systematic understanding of the advantages and limitations of each technique. Chapter III assesses the originality of the research questions and proposed solutions. Given the ongoing development and refinement of log file analysis tools and techniques by proficient teams in advanced corporations, and the substantial research already conducted in web usage mining, this dissertation compares its solution with prior works in these two domains. The similarities and disparities between them are evaluated to determine the uniqueness and value of

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate potential users’ preferences and expectations for fabric-based wearable e-nose system designs in order to develop painless and non-invasive monitoring systems for diabetes. Design/methodology/approach After developing a fabric-based wearable sensor, this study used an online survey with a mixture of closed- and open-ended questions about people’s desires and preferences for use-contexts, product types, design styles, and other key design factors. Findings This study investigated the preferences and expectations on designs of wearable e-nose systems for diabetes. The results showed that designers and developers need to consider important design components including sizes, shapes, and colors for practical wearable e-nose system designs. There were strong positive and significant correlations between participant characteristics and preferred wearable e-nose system design factors. Research limitations/implications Future research could compare differences between different age groups with different types of diabetes. Practical implications Understanding these differences will help designers and marketers target consumers and create diverse designs with different versions for success in the market. Originality/value There is lack of research for considering designs of wearable monitoring systems for diabetes. This research will be the first research to understand design preferences and expectations for developing wearable e-nose monitoring systems for diabetes.