User emotional experience evaluation on bicycle design from a multi-sensory perspective

It has been acknowledged that products providing better user emotional experience (UEX) have more chance to win in the market. Especially for sporting goods, the intensive user-product interaction evokes more complex user emotions. However, the research focusing on UEX is still deficient. Particularly, bicycles as the commonly used products in daily life have not been fully examined. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the UEX on bicycle design. For this end, two different bicycle saddles were chosen, a new semantic database was proposed, and three sets of experiments were conducted under different interaction types (i.e., vision, touch and cycling). Through the analysis of the experiment results, it can be found that different interaction types have an impact on the UEX of bicycle saddle designs; the visual appearance influences high- and low-involvement cyclists differently; and users’ riding postures (forward and upright) affect the emotional intensity of user experience on saddle designs.