Thank you for your interest in our work.
Today, I will talk about how visually impaired persons form their first impressions of technology.
This is joint work by Robin Abendschein, Selina Pauli, Lukas Schmid, and Stephan Huber
from the University of Würzburg.
Human judgements are substantially influenced by first impressions.
In previous studies, research on people’s first impressions of technical devices focused
mainly on visual attributes.
For example, Tractinsky and his co-authors postulated “what is beautiful is usable”.
This connection is referred to as the aesthetic-usability effect.
The effect describes that sighted users perceive aesthetically designed products as more usable
than products which are not visually pleasing.
However, there is a knowledge gap on impression formation for people with visual impairments.
This is especially true for first impressions of technical devices.
Therefore, our research question was: “How do visually impaired people make
their first impression of technical devices?”
In our explorative study, we aimed to find concepts that contribute to the first impression
of visually impaired people.
Specifically, we focused on haptic characteristics.
Social psychology suggests that impression formation involves a process of categorizing,
re-categorizing and individuating, where no existing categories can be found.
The Repertory Grid method can be used to uncover individual categories.
Participants compare specific objects of a domain and then come up with construct-contrast pairs.
Additionally, quantitative data is gathered by asking participants to rate the evaluated
objects regarding the constructs they mentioned.
In our study, we applied the Repertory Grid method to find out which haptic constructs
contribute to first impressions.
We therefore assessed if constructs are mentioned by several participants rather than evaluating
constructs quantitatively.
After performing the Repertory Grid method, we conducted a short follow-up interview
with each participant.
Regarding our participants, we invited three visually impaired people to report their first
impression of two device categories.
We selected devices that we suspected to be relevant for visually impaired people.
For this reason, we chose mobile phones and speakers as the device categories to be evaluated.
We proceeded our study as in the following video:
Initially, we gave our participants two technical devices of the same category.
Then, we asked the participants if the two devices are similar or different to each other.
While the participants explored the devices haptically, we stopped the time until they
first put each device down.
This gave us an idea of how long it takes to form a haptic first impression.
We explicitly asked which characteristics represent the similarity or difference between
the devices to retrieve constructs.
Then we prompted the participants to name a contrast for each construct
following the Repertory Grid method.
To empower blind participants, we created a haptic scale built out of a cardboard box
with tangible borders on the left and right side.
We asked participants to assign the named construct-contrast pair to the tangible borders
of the haptic scale.
These borders represented the maxima values of the named construct and contrast.
We instructed the participants to rate the devices.
Due to the scale’s continuity, participants could intuitively place objects at an appropriate
position on the scale without having to name concrete scale values.
We allocated the position of the device to a value between 1 and 10.
The rating procedure was repeated for the remaining devices.
We collected the constructs mentioned by the participants and clustered them into categories.
By qualitative clustering, we found five categories.
Participants most frequently mentioned constructs concerning the shape of the products,
for example the physical dimensions and the shape of the corners.
The other categories relate to buttons, surface, hardware & accessories as well as the devices’ weight.
The interviews at the end of the study sessions showed that haptic exploration is a strategy
that all participants used to gain a first impression of devices.
Furthermore, our participants’ responses indicated that apart from haptic perception,
auditory perception also contributes to first impression formation.
When choosing a suitable device, the participants considered the out-of-the-box accessibility features.
The participants also mentioned that the time to get a first impression varies “from seconds
up to a few minutes”, “depending on the product” and its properties.
In conclusion, we found several constructs and categories used to compare different devices.
They were related to haptic properties such as surface, shape and buttons.
Six of the constructs contributed to both, the phones as well as to the speakers presented.
The time until participants put down a device for the first time differed widely between
4 and 64 seconds.
The haptic scale we created empowers visually impaired persons to rate items autonomously
based on spatial relationships.
Future research can make use of this novel form of scale.
Regarding future work, we need to verify if putting down a device for the first time indicates
that a first impression has been formed.
Another yet unaddressed research aim is to confirm the generalizability of our findings
with different device categories and a larger sample.
These are the references cited in our presentation.
Thank you for your attention!