An investigation into the affective properties of sporting goods based on cycling experience

Abstract

Contemporary customers seek products that meet their emotional needs as well as performing an anticipated function. The existing process of evaluating customers' emotional requirements in a Kansei engineering system (KES), however, cannot fully reflect the user experience (UX), particularly for those products that involve physical interactions. Therefore, the research aim of this thesis is to apply KES for sports equipment design using bicycles as a case study.After conducting a thorough literature review and interviewing regular road cyclists, the thesis proposes a so-called UX-based collection method (UXCM). The UXCM consists of two modules, viz., temporal and multisensory, that represent the key UX characteristics.In addition to the qualitative interviews, an adapted semantic differential scale (SDS) and eye-tracking technique were applied to collect the customer's emotional requirements. The first case study of the visual impression of bicycle images was designed to test the hypothesis that cyclists' demands on cognitive-focused emotions (confidence) and affective-focused emotions (beauty) will change as their levels of involvement increased over time. The second case study investigated the impact of multisensory perceptions on Kansei words (K-words) among high-involvement road cyclists (HRC) and lowinvolvement road cyclists (LRC) using two bicycle saddle designs.