Cathrine V. Jansson-Boyd

Touch matters: exploring the relationship between consumption and tactile interaction

For a long time, vision dominated scientific research related to consumption. However, in the past 15 or so years there has been a gradual but steady interest in how the other senses can impact upon aspects such as consumer decision-making, product evaluation, and attention. The tactile sense in particular has been hailed as having the capacity to alter consumer perceptions and at times even directly compete with visual input. This review looks at numerous aspects of how touch is linked to consumption, such as; why it is an important tool, when tactile input is useful, the role of interpersonal touch in consumption and applicability to sales techniques, whether a “tactile language” can be established and how need for touch can be measured. By doing so this review draws upon research evidence from multiple disciplines, including consumer psychology, marketing, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. The review seeks to present the reader with a sense of why tactile research is important to consumer sciences.

What users know about the design process: a report on two exploratory studies

This paper reports on two exploratory studies aimed at understanding the extent to which people s responses to products are influenced by their ideas about the processes from which those products result. The first study involved analysing 400 comments from online discussions of two mobile phone handsets. The second study involved conducting and analysing interviews with 29 members of the public about their own mobile phone handsets. The results indicate that some (but not all) people are prone to view products not just as things that exist, but as the work of agents such as designers, manufacturers or brands. These agents were thought to hold certain beliefs about users and to shape products in the light of those beliefs. The products were also understood to result from motivations that the agents held (e.g. to make a profit) or constraints that acted upon them (e.g. manufacturing costs). Although only exploratory, the studies reveal some phenomena of product experience that are not discussed in the existing literature and they suggest ways in which those phenomena might be further studied.