Product Experience

The book brings together research that investigates how people experience products: durable, non-durable, or virtual. In contrast to other books, the present book takes a very broad, possibly all-inclusive perspective, on how people experience products. It thereby bridges gaps between several areas within psychology (e.g. perception, cognition, emotion) and links these areas to more applied areas of science, such as product design, human-computer interaction and marketing. The field of product experience research will include some of the research from four areas: Arts, Ergonomics, Technology, and Marketing. Traditionally, each of these four fields seems to have a natural emphasis on the human (ergonomics and marketing), the product (technology) or the experience (arts). However, to fully understand human product experience, we need to use different approaches and we need to build bridges between these various fields of expertise

Product Experience summarizes research on the emotional and cognitive experience of using products. The book explores product experience in terms of aesthetics and design, ergonomics and usability, product facilitation of human capacities and skills, entertainment value, and how product experience extends beyond the product itself to brand association, the shopping experience, and product packaging.

The book contains perspectives from a variety of disciplines in psychology, business, art, and engineering to fully understand the many components important to product experience. Product experience begins with judgments of aesthetics and value that are mitigated by environment and use, and then further altered by memory, association with brand, and the relationship one forms with the product.

Intended for researchers with an interest in human-product interactions, the book will appeal to psychologists, engineers, and business professionals interested in fully understanding product experience. With coverage of human factors, affect, perception, industrial design, engineering, information processing, ergonomics, industrial-organizational psychology, environmental psychology, business and marketing, communication, and product innovation, the book contains a wealth of information on a topic too broad to easily grasp via primary research in one discipline. International in scope, the book includes research from the US, Canada, UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Japan, and Germany.