Evaluation of the user emotional experience on bicycle saddle designs via a multi-sensory approach

Emotions always play an important role in users' experience and performance. However, not many studies have attempted to investigate the user emotional experience through fully considering the related sensory interactions. To address this gap, this study aims to provide a multi-sensory user experiment approach to evaluate user emotional experience on bicycle saddles. For this purpose, two semantic spaces, viz., sport emotion and product personality were utilized. Forty regular road cyclists were invited to evaluate two bicycle saddles by looking at, touching and riding it on a seven-point scale. The results showed that the perceived emotional intensity of Kansei words was affected by the types of user-product interaction and the riding postures. Moreover, the opposite effect of visual appearance and cycling performance was found in correlation with the cyclists’ level of involvement in the activity. Finally, more impressions of pleasure, comfortable, cute, warm, friendly and less traditional were recommended for further bicycle saddle design, particularly for female road cyclists.