Exploring Kansei structure and visualization of cellphone design cluster

The design of IT product today faces great challenge when design focus has shifted to incorporating user's implicit needs, specifically emotion when designing a product. In addressing iteraction design, cognitive functionality and usability has been given major attention. These have resulted good quality and usable products. However, with the equally good quality product flooding the market, consumers demand a new level of design that will draw their attention. Literature has discussed how product emotion affects consumer's attention. Thus, this work evaluates the emotional values of product design with the use of Kansei Engineering methodology. This is performed to explore the emotional structure that forms when user interacts with the product. An evaluation using 20 cell-phones as stimuli, a set of 40 emotional keywords, and 30 subjects were used. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis were performed to analyze the distribution of components and demonstrate the structure of emotion. The result shows that user's emotion in cell-phone design is structured by the dimension of attractiveness and simplicity. The results also enable the demonstration of the structure of emotion and its relation with product design, and visualize the cluster of product and its emotional values. The outcome is beneficial for designers and producers as they can have a clue on consumer's emotional responses and thus strategize new concept of product design that attracts consumer's attention.