Background & Goals
While working at the Center for Engagement Science: the joint venture of Adidas and Arizona State University. we came out with a new research questions that concerns with the impact of the most common design elements -color and texture- on the perceived speed of a product.
One of the main reasons that we wanted to conduct research around this topic is due to the lack of ability to communicate product property in the digital experience. And we hope by understanding what design elements can induce the intended product perception, we can help designer and marketers to better present products in the digital environment.
Simply put, Do blue make a product look faster than red? As we performed literature review on the existing research on this subject matter, we were surprised to learn that no one have published any scientific paper related to this topic. Then we quickly began to develop our research design and conducted research.
The goal for this research project is to develop a methodological approach to study the impact of systematically altering design elements on users' perception. This research method can then be implemented by designers and researchers alike to help them with their design process and help them to make an informed decision on what design elements to use for a desired outcome.
Currently, we have submitted our manuscript to academic journal for review and to publish it to the public.
Method
An interactive program was developed to present two shoe stepping animations in sequence and participants were instructed to determine which shoe traveled faster. One of the two shoes presented uses a selected color or texture style and the other one were the neutral control stimuli.
In total we tested 11 different patterns and 12 colors.
131 participants were recruited for data collection
Screenshot of the interactive program
example animation
Results
After conducting experiments and analyzing the data. We found out that systematic changes in design elements can alter the perception of speed of an object. Perception of speed was impacted significantly by texture alteration of an object than color alteration. And textures consisting of lines were perceived as the fastest with the plane and dot-based design elements being perceived as slowest.
Numbers of counts when each pattern or color were perceived as faster than the control.
My Learning
The space of design and perception is well understudied. More research and development can greatly benefit the industry. Our works have set a cornerstone that hopefully will drive more researchers to study this area.
