Validating an emerging tool based on auditory scale for decoding users’ emotional desires

More and more businesses are realizing the vital role of emotions in heightening the attractiveness and adding value to products. Due to the perceptual differences between designers and users, it is a key challenge for designers to transfer a user’s emotional desires into technical and design specifications, particularly cultural differences that may lead to ambiguous responses. We conducted research on revealing intangible emotions via quantifiable method, in order to bridge the discrepancy between designers’ intentions and users’ decoding. An emerging non-verbal tool was proposed, auditory parameter method (AP), which considers a set of auditory stimuli as scale to assess the emotions elicited by products. The objective was to investigate and validate whether the AP method is resistant to interference in cross-cultural and inter-ethnic application. Comparative experiments were organized in parallel with both Chinese and French participants, considering conventional verbal assessment semantic differential method (SD) as control group. The statistical results indicated that the auditory scale of AP method has slight intercultural differences in perception and interpretation.