Designing and Evaluating User Experience in a Space through Emotion, Eye-Movements and Behavior

Evaluation of space design, like offices or stores, is not necessarily determined only by visual impressions. People’s behavior is influenced by spaces, and equally, spaces are influenced by people’s activities. In other words, a space does not exist as a fixed physical object; rather it is constructed by the interaction between people and spaces. Therefore, in space design, it is important to design not only a physical space, but also people’s experiences. From such a viewpoint, we discuss the following framework for analyzing and evaluating space design, focused on the relationship between feelings, eye movements, and behavior.

1) Perform a Kansei-evaluation before and after experiencing a space to understand how experience affects emotions, 2) Record and analyze user behavior and eye movements to understand how people interact with a space, 3) Conduct retrospective interviews to understand the meaning and feeling of an experience.

We applied this framework to a bank, which was newly designed. From this case study, we were able to understand how users interacted with artifacts and information embedded in the space, and we obtained findings about the relation between user experiences and emotions. These findings provided implications for redesigning the space of the branch of a bank and confirmed the effectiveness of our framework.