Good Vibrations: Consumer Responses to Technology-Mediated Haptic Feedback

Abstract

Individuals often experience incidental device-delivered haptic feedback (e.g., vibrational alerts accompanying messages on mobile phones and wearables), yet almost no research has examined the psychological and behavioral implications of technology-mediated touch on consumers. Drawing from theories in social psychology and computer science, we explore how device-delivered haptic feedback may have the capability to augment consumer responses to certain consumer-directed communications. Across four studies, we find that haptic alerts accompanying messages can improve consumer performance on related tasks and demonstrate that this effect is driven by an increased sense of social presence in what can otherwise feel like an impersonal technological exchange. These findings provide applied value for mobile marketers and gadget designers, and carry important implications for consumer compliance in health and fitness domains.

User-Experience with Haptic Feedback Technologies and Text Input in Interactive Multimedia Devices

“…Similar to our results, most users found haptic feedback to provide the greatest degree of presence and to improve the object detection rate (task performance). On the usefulness of haptic feedback, which is implicit in the results of this UX study, it was found in [ 32 ] that device-driven haptic feedback may lead to increase consumer responses to certain consumer-directed communications, by improving consumer performance on related tasks and an increased sense of social presence. A more generic study on influence of haptic feedback on emotional arousal, sense of presence, and embodiment in virtual reality, can be found in [ 33 ], where the main conclusions also corroborate those obtained in this work, i.e., more engaging experience is obtained when haptic feedback is used.…”

Haptic-payment: Exploring vibration feedback as a means of reducing overspending in mobile payment

“…For instance, Lee and Spence (2008a) investigated the optimal timing of visual and vibrotactile feedback to create perceptions of synchrony between the two modalities. Building on this work, consumer studies have begun to explore consumers’ interaction with mobile devices (e.g., Brasel and Gips, 2014 , Hadi and Valenzuela, 2019 , Petit et al, 2019 ). For instance, Hadi and Valenzuela (2019) found that vibration feedback makes consumers more responsive to mobile messages that appear on a touchscreen.…”

“…The rich literature exploring the role of multisensory design in consumer technologies offers several insights. Studies in this area suggest that combinations of haptic and visual feedback delivered via mobile devices can effectively influence consumers’ responses to stimuli and events (e.g., Hadi and Valenzuela, 2019 , Lee et al, 2009 , Lee and Spence, 2008a , Lee and Spence, 2008b ). For instance, Hadi and Valenzuela (2019) found that pairing mobile message prompts with haptic vibration alerts improved consumers’ responsiveness to the messages due to increased feelings of social presence.…”

“…By leveraging existing knowledge of multisensory design in consumer technology (e.g., Lee et al, 2009 , Lee and Spence, 2008b , Spence, 2002 ), this work is the first to propose a non-intrusive way to shape consumers’ perceptions of cashless payment by using technology already found in most mobile devices. Next, recent work in the consumer literature has begun to explore the joint effect of visual and vibrotactile feedback in nudging consumers towards desired actions (e.g., Hadi & Valenzuela, 2019 ). This work has primarily focused on the role of multisensory feedback in stimulating positive behaviors – i.e., inducing consumers to pursue a goal.…”

“…Finally, although prior work has explored vibration intensity in order to determine at what thresholds people can detect different frequencies (e.g., Morioka and Griffin, 2005 , Oey and Mellert, 2004 ), HCI researchers are only beginning to explore how vibration intensity affects people’s psychological responses ( Abdullah et al, 2018 , Yoo et al, 2015 ). Some consumer work has explored responses to differing frequencies of auditory feedback ( Lowe, Loveland, & Krishna, 2018 ), but consumer studies using haptic feedback have only used a single vibration intensity ( Hadi & Valenzuela, 2019 ). Thus, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to find that differences in vibration intensity feedback can affect consumption behavior.…”