A fuzzy rule-based approach to modeling affective user satisfaction towards office chair design [An article from: International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics]

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Description:
Affective user satisfaction is considered one of the most important factors in designing consumer products. Researchers have attempted to build models explaining the relationship between design variables of consumer products and affective user satisfaction using statistical multivariate analysis techniques such as linear regression and quantification theory. These techniques, however, have limitations due to the inability of capturing non-linearity of human feelings. This paper proposes a fuzzy rule-based approach to building models relating product design variables to affective user satisfaction. Affective user satisfaction such as luxuriousness, balance, and attractiveness were modeled for office chair designs. Regression models were also built on the same data to compare model performance. The results showed that fuzzy rule-based models were better than regression models in terms of prediction performance and the number of variables included in the model. Methods for interpreting the fuzzy rules are discussed for practical applications in designing office chairs. Relevance to industry: This study proposes a fuzzy rule-based method for analyzing and interpreting affective user satisfaction of consumer products, which can help designers and developers to identify important design variables, and to estimate the responses of various user groups for a new product design.