A sound-based protocol to study product emotions

Emotions influence how a customer interacts with the product. To be able to instil emotional values in product design, the understanding of user emotions and the measurement of emotions are interesting challenges. Several measuring methods use visual or verbal stimuli as assessment scales. Until recently, hearing was an ill-explored part for emotions measurement. This paper describes a new protocol based on sounds for eliciting user emotions. The method uses a set of sounds and association tests, made by a panel of participants. Cars pictures were evaluated by three user-tests based on both this new protocol and a classical protocol, the semantic differential. We describe in the paper the main stages of the new method and we compare its results with the semantic differential method both with semantic attributes and emotional attributes using principal component analysis. The new protocol demonstrates interesting qualities to collect the intuitive emotions of user.