Effects of product personalisation degree on user perception in car front design

Abstract

The front facia gives the car vivid features; accordingly, and an appropriate product personalisation degree (PD) can improve product branding, related to the appearance design, while avoiding excessive design features. This study investigates the effects of the car front facia PD on user perceptions and proposes design guidelines for vehicle designers and manufacturers. An open-ended experiment was conducted with 30 participants using 60 car fronts to study user emotions and preferences related to product personality based on questionnaire and physiological electrical signal evaluation results. The features were extracted using the chaos theory and cvxEDA algorithm. The obtained results indicate that the PD was consistent with user emotions. Furthermore, when the consistency between PD and user emotions is high, a significant variation in user preferences can be observed. Therefore, when designing high-PD products, the sub-item product personalisation degree (sub-item PD) should be carefully managed, considering the overall logic and coherence.

Highlights

1. Product personalisation degree is positively correlated with the subjective and objective emotions of users.

2. The impact of product personalisation degree on user preferences and subjective emotions is not always the same, particularly pleasure and arousal.

3. When product personalisation degree is highly correlated with the subjective and objective emotions of users, the user preferences are highly differentiated.

KEYWORDS:

• Product personalisation
• user perception
• user emotion

Acknowledgments

We thank all the participants for carrying out the experiments. Further, we thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant no 52075478]; National Key Research and Development Program of China [grant no 2021YFF0900603]; the Key project of National Social Science Foundation of China [grant no 21AZD056]; the Major art project of National Social Science Foundation of China [grant no 20ZD09-5]; and the Major project of Zhejiang Social Science Foundation [grant no 21XXJC01ZD]