Kansei Engineering and Web Site Design

Abstract

Capturing users’ needs is critical in web site design. However, a lot of attention has been paid to enhance the functionality and usability, whereas much less consideration has been given to satisfy the emotional needs of users, which is also important to a successful design. This paper explores a methodology based on Kansei Engineering, which was significant used in product and industrial design but not quite been adopted in the IT field, in order to discover implicit emotional needs of users toward web site and transform them into design details. Survey, interview techniques and statistical methods were performed in this paper. A prototype web site was developed based on the Kansei study results integrated with technical expertise and practical considerations. The results showed that the Kansei Engineering methodology, in this paper, played a significant role in web site design in terms of satisfying the emotional needs of users.