User's Affective Response Research Articles

A Comparative Study of Virtual Footwear Try-On Applications in Virtual and Augmented Reality

Abstract Virtual try-on technology (VTO) in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) has been developed for years to create novel shopping experiences for users by allowing them to virtually wear fashion products. Compared to garments or facial accessories, fewer studies have focused on virtual footwear try-on, regardless of user study or technical development. Thus, it is necessary to examine the effectiveness of existing VTO applications on the user's affective responses. In this study, we compared the user experience of three different footwear try-on methods (real, VR, and AR) with both physiological and psychological measures. Subjects conducted a try-on experiment on different pairs of sneakers. Each subject’s gaze trajectory was recorded using an eye tracker and analyzed to show his/her visual attention in each method. Afterward, the subjects completed questionnaires to assess the sense of presence, usability, and the user experience score for the try-on processes, and subsequently attended a think-aloud procedure to express their thoughts. The analysis results of the collected data showed that the user experience produced by the VR and AR try-on is not comparable to that of the real environment. The results also revealed factors that negatively affect the quality of the user's interaction with the processes. These findings may provide insights into further improvements in VTO technology.

Affective judgment in creative design: A method of fitness evaluation to the problem/solution spaces

A method of fitness evaluation to the problem/solution spaces is proposed based on the affective judgment in creative design. Six experienced designers and one-hundred-one users participated in a set of exploratory experiments on affective judgement of automobile design. From the experimental data, we identify the differences in designer's affective appeal in a design and user's affective response to the design. From data analysis, we confirm the general validity of that the ‘creative’ aspect of design can be described by introducing the notions of ‘default’ and ‘surprise’ problem/solution spaces. The affective judgments based on the expectations of designers and users are shown to be an effective alternative to quantitative metrics in design evaluation and concept selection. The presented findings suggested that the success and creativity are not the same, the goal of design practice is to find solutions that are both creative and successful.

Rich unboxing experiences: complexity in product packaging and its influence upon product expectations

We explore the influence of complexity in packaging design, defined as complexity of action and transformation, upon product appraisal at an unboxing phase of product life cycle. Three packaging designs of different complexity were developed and prototyped. Participant responses were then gathered through ten bipolar semantic differential scales that measured the influence of packaging complexity upon expectation towards and appraisal of the packaged product. Results indicate how increased complexity of action and transformation evoked higher expectations of product quality. Complexity of product packaging was shown to significantly influence the participants' appraisal of the packaged product's personality. Findings contribute to an understanding of how complexity in product packaging implicates the user's affective response to the packaged product through increased expectation resulting in either heightened delight or increased dissatisfaction. Implications for the use of complexity of action and transformation in product packaging design are discussed.

Rich unboxing experiences: complexity in product packaging and its influence upon product expectations

We explore the influence of complexity in packaging design, defined as complexity of action and transformation, upon product appraisal at an unboxing phase of product life cycle. Three packaging designs of different complexity were developed and prototyped. Participant responses were then gathered through ten bipolar semantic differential scales that measured the influence of packaging complexity upon expectation towards and appraisal of the packaged product. Results indicate how increased complexity of action and transformation evoked higher expectations of product quality. Complexity of product packaging was shown to significantly influence the participants' appraisal of the packaged product's personality. Findings contribute to an understanding of how complexity in product packaging implicates the user's affective response to the packaged product through increased expectation resulting in either heightened delight or increased dissatisfaction. Implications for the use of complexity of action and transformation in product packaging design are discussed.

Influence of Color in a Lactation Room on Users' Affective Impressions and Preferences.

The present study aims to examine the influence of environmental color hue in a lactation room at a health center on users' affective response and preference. Hospital design plays an important role in the emotional experience of patients. In this regard, many studies have attempted to find relationships between design variables and healthcare facilities users' response. Color has been frequently examined because it is always present in the environment and can be easily changed. However, most of the studies dealing with color-emotion relationships acquire users' affective response by questionnaires developed by experts which could lead to inaccurate results since nonexperts may misunderstand concepts set by experts and use nonimmersive images to simulate the environments to assess. To overcome these limitations, a Kansei Engineering-based approach was proposed. In the first phase, users' specific affective factors for lactation rooms were determined using Semantic Differential. In the second phase, the influence of nine different color hues on users' affective factors was obtained. An immersive display system was used to visualize the room altering hues in an isolated and controlled way. (1) Six user's affective factors connected to the lactation rooms were discovered: safety, elegance, coziness, spaciousness, simplicity, and luminosity, of which coziness has the most impact on the assessment of the room. (2) Warm colors like orange and yellow tend to score highly for coziness which puts them in leading positions when users' assess lactation rooms. Results provide recommendations for designers and show the advantages of using semantic differential and immersive displays to analyze user's affective response to environments.

EFFECTIVE USE OF PHYSIOLOGICAL METRICS TO ASSESS USER EMOTION AND BEHAVIOR INTENTION BASED ON AN EYE TRACKER AND NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL APPROACH

Products are successfully designed only when they are in accord with the users’ emotional needs. A systematic research approach is aimed to propose that physiological metrics can be effectively used to assess user emotion and behavior intention based on an eye tracker and neurophysiological approach. Forty participants (20 males and 20 females, mean age=35.6, SD=6.38, range 21-48 years), were recruited from college campuses and communities to conduct an eye tracker and electroencephalography (EEG) experiment with the presented stimuli (images of SUVs). The study uses partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the model hypotheses. The results show a strong and significant relationship between eye tracker metrics, neurophysiological metrics, user affective responses, and behavior intention. These findings could enable industrial counselors, professional product designers, and academics to categorize users’ emotional needs that can be subsequently incorporated into final product design.

Extracting relevance and affect information from physiological text annotation

We present physiological text annotation, which refers to the practice of associating physiological responses to text content in order to infer characteristics of the user information needs and affective responses. Text annotation is a laborious task, and implicit feedback has been studied as a way to collect annotations without requiring any explicit action from the user. Previous work has explored behavioral signals, such as clicks or dwell time to automatically infer annotations, and physiological signals have mostly been explored for image or video content. We report on two experiments in which physiological text annotation is studied first to (1) indicate perceived relevance and then to (2) indicate affective responses of the users. The first experiment tackles the user's perception of relevance of an information item, which is fundamental towards revealing the user's information needs. The second experiment is then aimed at revealing the user's affective responses towards a -relevant- text document. Results show that physiological user signals are associated with relevance and affect. In particular, electrodermal activity was found to be different when users read relevant content than when they read irrelevant content and was found to be lower when reading texts with negative emotional content than when reading texts with neutral content. Together, the experiments show that physiological text annotation can provide valuable implicit inputs for personalized systems. We discuss how our findings help design personalized systems that can annotate digital content using human physiology without the need for any explicit user interaction.