Measuring Haptic Experience: Evidence for the HX model through scale development

Abstract

Haptic technology allows one to receive tactile information through the sense of touch. Increasingly, designers and researchers are employing haptic feedback with the aim to improve user experience (UX). While they see the importance and significance of including haptic feedback in everyday applications, there is a lack of standardized tools to assess the quality of these experiences. They currently use qualitative methods or demos for obtaining user feedback; neither approach scales to large studies or remote work. We aim to bridge this gap and complement the existing approaches by developing an instrument that comprehensively measures haptic user experience.

We follow a systematic scale development framework to build, evaluate and establish a first draft of the haptic user experience scale - the Haptic eXperience Index (HXI), which has the potential to measure the effectiveness of haptic experiences. This scale is built upon the recent Haptic Experience (HX) model and it contributes a novel instrument that measures the five foundational constructs for designing haptic experiences: Harmony, Expressivity, Autotelics, Immersion, and Realism. We iteratively developed a set of 20 questions through a series of studies: expert reviews (N=6), face validity (N=8), cognitive interviews (N=9), and exploratory factor analysis (N=261). Our results provide evidence for the HX model’s five factors, with an enriched description of each factor, and implications for how to measure HX, including a first proposed draft of the HXI.

In this process, we gained an in-depth understanding of the factors we considered for developing HXI; what applications can be chosen for representing a rather diverse set of experiences; understand the limitations, and define future work. This HXI is a steppingstone towards a generalized evaluation tool to measure haptic experience.