Applying Kansei engineering to determine emotional signature of online clothing websites

In the discipline of design science, the integration of cognitive, semantic and affective elements is crucial in
the conception and development of designed products. IT artefact design and development has ignored the importance of affective elements until recent years. There is now a growing interest in addressing affective
elements of system design within the HCI community. Current literature reflects two main foci in the area:
emotional design and its evaluation. Of the two, the later is widely researched and reported. In our paper,
we present our research attempt to establish the design method for organizing the emotional design requirements of E-commerce websites by applying Kansei engineering (KE). We proposed a Kansei website design method and demonstrated the method by conducting the semantic evaluation of pre-selected online clothing websites using 40 Kansei words as descriptors of emotional sensation which was organized as a 5-point Semantic Differential (SD) scale to form the Kansei checklist. 120 participants were asked to rate 35 pre-selected online clothing websites using the Kansei checklist. Cluster analysis and Partial Least Square method were then performed to identify the Kansei word cluster and from this result we uncover the relationship between Kansei word cluster and online clothing website design.