Applying event related potentials to evaluate user preferences toward smartphone form design

• Brain responses related to user preference were investigated.
• Product form designs with an ability to arouse subjects' user preference can evoke enhanced N2, P2 and P3.
• The behavioural results showed that participants responded faster to preferred product forms.
• The ERPs method leads to the development of user preference measurement and product evaluation.

Product forms can affect user preference and play an important role in user's purchasing decisions. Neuroimaging methods can provide an improved understanding of the mechanisms of decision making, which enhance the ability of enterprises to effectively design their products. Hence event related potentials (ERPs) were applied to explore the brain activity evoked by variety of product forms when users made preference among them. Smartphone product forms were displayed with equiprobability randomly. Participants were asked to click the left mouse button when they preferred one product form, else the right button for nonpreferred. The brain signals of each participant were recorded by Curry 7.0. Finally, brain signals were processed by using Curry 7.0 SBA and SPSS 18.0 software. The results showed that preferred product forms evoked enhanced N2, P2 and P3. Moreover, there were significant correlation between ERPs and behavioural data, participants devoted more attention and had faster responding time to preferred products than to nonpreferred. These results indicate that the differences of ERPs can be used to evaluate user preference.Relevance to industryThe integration of customer preferences is nowadays a challenge in new product development. Hence a thorough research on the inherent mechanism of preference formation can provide an accurate measurement method of user's perception. The differences of brain signals evoked by product forms can also provide technical support for product designers, which in turn can meet with user experience. Moreover, the results can be taken as evaluating indicators of product design.