Towards Remote Assessment of User Experiences of Visual Product Representations

Understanding consumer experiences of products is becoming increasingly important for producers acting on the global market. This paper presents a pilot study done as part of the development of a VIPET (Visual Internet Product Experience Tool), a future tool for remote user assessment of product experiences. The aim of the tool is to provide users with a convenient and intuitive approach to assess visual representations of products by allowing respondents to place visual representations of products in the form of images in relation to each other on a type of bipolar visual analogue scales in the form of 2x2 charts. The purpose of the study was to evaluate a prototype version of the visual interface of the tool using international respondents. The prototype tool was emailed to respondents in five countries, asking them to assess an everyday type of product, food packaging containers, against six parameters, measuring types of perceptual experience. The results of the study indicate that remote assessment of visual representations of products using a tool of this type is a promising approach. Even though some test results are presented the major interest of this paper is not in the assessments of the specific products as such, but rather the characteristics and quality of the assessment method itself and the implications for the development of a tool for assessing consumer experiences.