Exploring the effects of contextual factors on home lighting experience

Background Although lighting increasingly penetrates our everyday life due to technology advancement, little is known about how people interact with lighting and how contextual factors impact on the experience. Thus, this study attempted to reveal how two contextual factors (the level of concentration required for pleasant lighting use and social interaction) could influence the manipulation of lighting parameters, particularly focusing on the major factors of lighting such as illuminance, color temperature, and hue. Methods To understand of the interaction between contextual factors and lighting variables, an experiment was conducted. 10 singles and 10 couples had to manipulate lighting variables such as intensity and colorin five everyday situations for pleasant lighting experience. Results The result of the experiment showed that illuminance, color temperature and hue are influenced by the degree of concentration, but only partially influenced by social factors. The findings could provide a better understanding of manipulating lighting variables in terms of use context with design practitioners. Conclusions The overall findings of the study indicate that illuminance, color temperature, and hue are significantly dependent upon the level of concentration required in at-home lighting use, and also have only a partial dependence on social effect. This implies that although we assumed that people have their personal lighting preferences, their preferences can be largely dependent on the degree of concentration required for at-home pleasant lighting use. Hence, there are common patterns among people in manipulating lighting parameters, which are less dependent on personal differences. © Archives of Design Researc

The Relationship between User Personality Traits and Perceived Product Characteristics

Background : Due to current market globalization, a single electronic product such as the iPhone is used by many users worldwide. However, the ways that consumers perceive products cannot be necessarily the same because consumers belong to their own inherent culture and individual characteristics. Recently, the electronics industry has realized the importance of local and personal influences of product perception. Nonetheless, there have been very few studies on how individual characteristics may influence perceived product characteristics. Personality has been recognized as a representative variable of individual characteristics. Therefore, this exploratory study investigates how user personality can make a difference in the perception of product characteristics. Methods : The iPhone was selected among various popular electronic products as a target product. A questionnaire survey and interview were conducted to discover the correlation between user personality traits and perceived product characteristics. Twenty Dutch iPhone users participated in the study. Results : The overall results indicate that there is a relationship between user personality traits and perceived product characteristics. Each personality trait showed a significant correlation with the perception of particular product characteristics. However, function did not show a significant correlation. Conclusion : The personality traits of the user influenced the perception of product characteristics. Therefore, it is imperative to figure out how the personality of the user correlates with particular product characteristics while increasing user satisfaction. These findings can provide designers a better understanding of how product characteristics are differently perceived, depending on particular user personality traits, and help designers map the design direction of their target user group.clos

Positive User Experience over Product Usage Life Cycle and the Influence of Demographic Factors

This paper reveals how the patterns of positive user experience in relation to a product vary over the usage life cycle, from before purchase to disposal/repurchase, and in what way the positive experience interacts with demographic factors. As constructs of positive user experience, five attributes of positive user experience were adopted in the study: aesthetics; instrumentality; association; self-focused identification; and relationship-focused identification. Love letter, UX curve and retrospective interviews were used as methods. A total of 49 people participated in the study. The results indicate that the critical attributes of positive user experiences differed to a large extent according to the phase of product usage. However, these differences were not significant in terms of gender and age. Among the five attributes, instrumentality played a main role in positive experiences throughout the product usage life cycle, while the importance of the other attributes tended to decrease after first-time usage. The findings highlight implications for design practice that can aid the process of designing for long-lasting positive user experience throughout the product usage life cycle

Characterizing Natural User Interface with Wearable Smart Watches

Background - The emergence of new interaction paradigms makes the use of technology inrealizing the users??? natural ways of exploring the real world the ultimate goal of designers today.Research on interactive and immersive technologies for user interface design is still a challenging chore for engineers and scientists when it comes to designing natural interaction for wearable smart devices. To address the challenge, our study aims to develop guidelines for design practitioners in designing wearable smart watches that could offer natural user experiences. Methods - To better understand natural user experiences with smart watches, an extensive literature review was conducted. A quantitative survey with 80 participants was conducted, of which the focus was on the expected functions of smart watches. Based on the survey results, we selected eight participants in terms of technology familiarity. To achieve the objectives of our research, three studies were conducted: a design workshop (Study 1), a cultural probe (Study 2), and a focus group interview (Study 3). The design workshop was created to figure out the needs and wishes people have forsmart watches. In the cultural probe, the focus was on figuring out natural interactions with smart watches. Finally, the focus group interview aimed to gain more insights from the results of the cultural probe in terms of natural user interaction with particular functions. Results - To address the needs and wishes of the users toward wearable smartwatches, we made a subdivision into three categories, such as functions, input measures, and notification (feedback) methods. According to the results, participants wanted weather notification, health monitoring, and identification as expected functions. Regarding the methodof input, voice command and touch screen were preferred. In order to get feedback, most of the participantswanted vibrations, particularly as a reaction tocompleting the commands or inputs. There was also a suggestion to customize their smart watch. For example, users can select the functions and build their own command system, and even choose the notificationmethods. Considering natural user interface with respect to functions (weather, answering a call, navigation, health monitoring, taking a picture and messaging), specific natural user interfaces were mentioned for particular functions. Conclusions - Throughout the study, people???s needs and wishes and their perceptions about natural interaction were identified and the characteristics of natural user interfacesweredetermined. Based on the results, tenperceptions were specifically defined to provide a better understanding of smart watches in terms of natural interaction: user affinity of form, awareness by familiarity, reality correspondence, behavioral extension, purpose orientation, easiness of performance, timeliness, routine acceptance, generality, and rule of thumb. In addition to that, natural user interfaces were categorized into five groups: user familiarity, realistic interaction, accomplishment assistance, contextual appropriateness, and social awareness. In this study,we tried to identify what constitutes anatural interaction and how it should be created. The limitations and further study are discussed at the end.ope

Predictors of Upcycling in the Highly IndustrialisedWest: A Survey across Three Continents of Australia, Europe, and North America

open access articleUpcycling, as a way to reutilise resources, offers a promising alternative to production and consumption based on virgin materials. Despite the growing academic and industrial interest in recent years, there is a lack of large-scale cross-country or cross-regional studies that systematically investigate influencing factors for consumer upcycling behaviour. By drawing on social psychological theories of interpersonal behaviour and planned behaviour, this study investigated predictors of upcycling behaviour in five highly industrialised countries of three continents: Australia, Canada, Germany, UK, and USA. Results showed that intention and perceived behavioural control (confidence in abilities) were the most important factors for upcycling. Theoretical and practical implications from this study are discussed in the context of efforts to scale up global upcycling

Evaluation of TV commercials using neurophysiological responses

Background: In recent years, neuroscientific knowledge has been applied to marketing as a novel and efficient means to comprehend the cognitive and behavioral aspects of consumers. A number of studies have attempted to evaluate media contents, especially TV commercials using various neuroimaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG). Yet neurophysiological examination of detailed cognitive and affective responses in viewers is still required to provide practical information to marketers. Here, this study develops a method to analyze temporal patterns of EEG data and extract affective and cognitive indices such as happiness, surprise, and attention for TV commercial evaluation. Methods: Twenty participants participated in the study. We developed the neurophysiological indices for TV commercial evaluation using classification model. Specifically, these model-based indices were customized using individual EEG features. We used a video game for developing the index of attention and four video clips for developing indices of happiness and surprise. Statistical processes including one-way analyses of variance (ANOVA) and the cross validation scheme were used to select EEG features for each index. The EEG features were composed of the combinations of spectral power at selected channels from the cross validation for each individual. The Fisher's linear discriminant classifier (FLDA) was used to estimate each neurophysiological index during viewing four different TV commercials. Post hoc behavioral responses of preference, short-term memory, and recall were measured. Results: Behavioral results showed significant differences for all preference, short-term memory rates, and recall rates between commercials, leading to a 'high-ranked' commercial group and a 'low-ranked' group (P < 0.05). Neural estimation of happiness results revealed a significant difference between the high-ranked and the low-ranked commercials in happiness index (P < 0.01). The order of rankings based on happiness and attention matched well with the order of behavioral response rankings. In the elapsed-time analysis of the highest-ranked commercial, we could point to visual and auditory semantic structures of the commercial that induced increases in the happiness index. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that the neurophysiological indices developed in this study may provide a useful tool for evaluating TV commercialsclose0

The Influence of User Characteristics in Negative Product Use Experience

Although User-centred design is prevalent in designing consumer electronic products, the number of product in consumer electronic industry is continuously increasing. Most of the reasons are not technical in nature but have to do with negative product use experience resulting from all kinds of non-technical problems, defined as ???soft??? problems. The problems are becoming a threat to the industry leading to a large number of product returns. A lack of responding to user diversity due to globalisation is supposedly to be blamed for this product return, considering that user experience with a product cannot be necessarily the same between people. This represents that the current user-centred design methods applied by companies have limits to cope with the diversity between users. Therefore, this study aims to reveal the interaction between user characteristics representing user diversity and soft problems as negative product use experience. A sample of 567 people was invited to a questionnaire survey: 181 American, 201 South Korean and 176 Dutch people. The results indicate that types of soft problems are influenced by particular user characteristics including culture. The implications to the industry are discussed as well

User characteristics and behaviour in operating annoying electronic products

Despite the enormous progress in technology and design over the last decades, consumer dissatisfaction is increasing, mainly because of soft usability problems: problems that have nothing to do with technical failure. In earlier studies, types of soft usability problems have been influenced on the one hand by product properties and on the other hand by user characteristics. These studies are all based on retrospective data. However, common practice in the manufacturing industry is to test their prototypes through user trials, which means testing products in actual use. Therefore, this paper discusses an experiment investigating the effects of the relationship between product properties and user characteristics by way of a user trial with two products whose usability is known to be problematic. Overall, 84 participants, between the ages of 20 to 74, participated in this study. The experiment was conducted in the USA, South Korea and the Netherlands. In this way we were able to compare this actual use situation with our previous retrospective studies in relation to different cultures. The study concludes that there are differences in soft usability problems between actual use and retrospective evaluation. The kind of soft usability problems experienced is partly dependent on both user characteristics and product properties. The role of users' expectations as well as their follow-up behaviour in relation to soft usability problems is discussed.close

Improving User's Well-being Through Leveraging Attachment to Interactive Products

As smart technologies are advanced, interactive products are being more and more developed like person to person interaction than person to product interaction. More attention has to be paid to product attachment because interactive products are designed as human agent. However, few studies have been conducted to address the interaction between user and product based on interpersonal relationship. Therefore, this study attempts to figure out what user???s attachment to interactive products can be formed and how the findings could help design practitioners increase user???s well-being. As a first step of the study, literature review was conducted. According to that, studies on product attachment have focused on the determinants of product attachment. However, there are four different attachment types in psychology. It was also found that attachment is a contributor of people???s well-being. Based on the findings from literature, this study discusses the contributions of the study and followup studies

Positive Emodiversity in Everyday Human-Technology Interactions and Users' Subjective Well-Being

This paper investigates the effects of experiencing diverse positive emotions in technology use on users' well-being, referred to as positive emodiversity. We examined technology's role in facilitating positive emodiversity and well-being through a questionnaire study (N = 116; 580 example cases), in which three sources of emotions were considered: technology as an object, instrument, or enabler. Further, we evaluated how technology-supported hedonic and eudaimonic pursuits are associated with well-being. A regression analysis showed that increased positive emodiversity leads to increased well-being (p<.001). The effect was predicted by the three sources and both hedonic and eudaimonic pursuits. When engaged in positive activities enabled by technology, users experienced more diverse positive emotions, increasing their well-being. The study offers new understandings of the relationships between technologies, emodiversity, and well-being, and provides evidence that designing for a wide diversity of positive emotions, as opposed to generalized pleasure-displeasure distinction, can enrich users' experiences, enhancing their well-being