How does it feel? - Investigating Soft-Touch Surface Experience Dimensions

Abstract

Haptic qualities of surfaces play an important role for the user's experience with a system. In that context, soft touch surfaces are important as they are often used for surfaces of industrial products. For assessing related experiences, research is often focusing on physical properties of the surfaces rather than the (quality of) experience of the user. Therefore, we set out to analyze how people describe their experience of surface properties in a bottom-up approach. In an Open Profiling study we let people self-describe, cluster and rate surface properties. Based on these ratings we applied a Principal Component Analysis to identify characteristics and related perception dimensions of soft touch surfaces. Furthermore, we complement this with an expert clustering of user self-descriptions. Our analysis shows that descriptions can be categorized in pragmatic and hedonic (and/or affective) dimensions. With this research we contribute to better understanding the quality of material related experiences.