Clarification of Kansei Elements of Attractiveness Related to Usability for Long Term Mobile Phone Users

Recently, in the IT products area, it has become difficult to distinguish among products by function. Usability is one of the most important user requirements for products. And we assume that the other important factor related to distinctiveness among products is Kansei (human sensibility). One of the elements for usability from the viewpoint of Kansei is attractiveness. IT product manufacturers need to consider the user’s Kansei when developing products. By clarifying the mechanism involved in Kansei and by developing a quantitative Kansei element evaluation method, we will be able to develop attractive IT products continuously. We targeted long term users, and we ran a subjective evaluation experiment for attractiveness related to usability including a questionnaire concerning the factors that influenced the judgment of the evaluation and we clarified some of the elements of human interface that influenced Kansei elements of attractiveness related to usability. The results indicate that when people use mobile phones considering accessibility to some function, they feel “kinetic”, “dynamic”, and “refreshing” and when they use mobile phones considering errors when sending an e-mail or making a call, they feel “three dimensional”, “impressive”, “surprising”, “epoch-making”, and “natural” and want to use them. The results also indicate that when they use mobile phones considering ease of inputting text, they feel “good operability”, “hard to make an error”, “controllable as one likes”, “stress-free”, and “want to keep using”.