Visual Product Assessment by Using the Eye-Tracking Equipment to Study the Effect of Product Shapes on consumer’s Thinking

Abstract

Product design has become a significant tool for successful companies. Products arouse emotional feelings in consumers. Emotions can effect buying decisions of consumers as well as product assessments. It is broadly recognized that higher user satiation and better product performance can be reached through product aesthetic design. Integrating emotional value into tangible products has become an important approach for increasing a product’s emulative power in the retail market. Therefore, it is a need of manufactures to understand how product aesthetics impact the consumer’s emotions. On the other hand, when designing a new product, maximum time focus is paid for the enhancement of its usability and functionality, and very little attention is paid to consumers’ emotional desires. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between product structure/features and consumer emotions. Two different products are considered in this study. In addition, by using the four basic pleasures model of Jordan a closed list of product-specific semantic descriptors is developed. An eye-tracker-based experiment and open-ended survey were performed during this study, where substantial connections between product geometry and semantic were found. In this study, we find out the emotional responses for geometric features from users, and the major finding of eye-tracker is discussed in brief in the results section. The study results are helpful in future product development and reduce the failure rate of the product.