Investigating the Haptic Aspects of Verbalised Product Experiences

Jessica Persdotter Dagman, MariAnne Karlsson, Li Wikström

The human senses play an important role in people’s understanding and experience of products. The overall aim of this explorative study was to further investigate users’ haptic product experiences in respect of how they are verbalised and how they relate to visual product experiences. The pilot studies revealed an important result, showing the participants’ difficulty in verbalising product experiences. A mediating tool was therefore introduced to trigger the information. The main results of the study are that haptic product experiences appeared to contribute to all experience dimensions, but especially those concerning the dimensions “interface qualities” and “objective/measurable”. The results indicate that the information received from one sense created expectations for experiences through other senses and the information perceived through the second sense was used to confirm or modify anticipated experiences. The less prior knowledge participants had of the particular product, the more important the additional information delivered through the second sense appeared to be. Finally, haptic product experiences appeared to be related to a few haptic product properties, but more systematic studies need to be carried out to confirm these results and to identify the effect of the product properties on the intensity of different haptic product experiences.