Kansei Engineering Concept in E-commerce Website

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, the affective quality has become important than ever. Affect has been proven to influence human cognitive judgments, and human first impression or primary affective responses to a website is seen to influence cognitive quality and higher order affect, such as Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use. The study focuses at human Perceived Affective Quality, which looks at both valence and arousal dimension of affect, in the measurement of affective responses to an e-Commerce website. Kansei Engineering is a technique that is seen to enable the measurement and assimilation of the affective responses into perceptual design element. This paper presents the concept and framework of Kansei Engineering in e-Commerce websites. The framework provides systematic method of evaluating consumer’s subjective emotional responses and ways to determine correlation of emotional responses with website design. Further research with empirical studies will enable to formulate guideline to design affective quality website. Result of such studies will help to increase understanding between web designers and users, and improve affective quality of a website. The design of affective quality website will result a paradigm shift from WYSIWYG to WYSIWYD.