Kansei Engineering: a Study on Perception of Online Clothing Websites

In the early days of e-Commerce, web designers follow their intuition of how the website should look like. Further development of web design have seen for instance Nielsen’s heuristic, which resulted designers to focus mainly on cognitive functionality and usability. However, as technology advances and e-Commerce matures, there is a growing concern to improve the consumer interface of e-Commerce to improve the persuasive power of eCommerce websites by engineering affective appeal in website design. This paper presents a study in progress involving the adoption of Kansei Engineering in e-Commerce websites as a systematic method to engineer consumer’s affective appeal and incorporate them into new formulae of web design. Principal Component Analysis was performed to analyse structure of Kansei Words, and investigates relations between Kansei and website designs.