The emotional experience of the driver is influenced by the design of the in-vehicle interaction interface. User experience journey maps are commonly used by designers to reveal interface design pain points and refine user needs, and further studies are required to effectively characterize and quantify user emotional needs. This study provides a method for accurately presenting a driver’s emotional experience through a human–machine interface using Kansei engineering and user experience journey. Firstly, the semantic difference approach was used to match the relationship between user behavioral touchpoints and Kansei imagery words of the interface. And then the emotional quantification curve was built to generate an average value for Kansei imagery word evaluation. Finally, design pain points were identified and iterative design was carried out. A validation study was implemented to ensure the method’s validity. The study demonstrated that a quantitative map of user emotional experience could efficiently quantify and depict the findings of emotional quantification. This method enables designers to accurately recognize user needs while also facilitating product iterations.

Olfactory stimulation can alleviate passive task-related fatigue (PTR), but its mechanism and influencing factors are still unclear. This study used a controlled experimental design to explore the effect of mint odor on driving fatigue by comparing the driving fatigue induction stage (monotonous driving) with the awakening stage (olfactory intervention). The experiment controlled the stimulation duration (1 min vs. 8 min), traffic flow (low vs. high), and concentration (low, medium, and high), and combined subjective scales, heart rate variability (HRV), and percent eyelid closure (PERCLOS) indicators to evaluate the effect. The results showed that under high traffic flow, 8 min of stimulation relieved fatigue most significantly; moderate concentration was the best for physiological arousal, but high concentration was subjectively preferred; HRV was more sensitive than PERCLOS, and age and driving experience regulated the response. Context-based olfactory intervention can effectively alleviate fatigue, and stimulation duration and environmental load are key regulatory factors. This study advances the theoretical framework of multimodal fatigue management and provides practical suggestions for the design of adaptive vehicle warning systems.

Objective: Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) play a crucial role in digital healthcare. While existing studies have examined the effect of ECAs’ appearances and nonverbal behaviors on acceptance, the mechanism by which nonverbal behaviors and speech characteristics jointly influence patients’ satisfaction remains unclear. This study explores the impact of medical ECAs’ nonverbal behaviors and speech characteristics on patients’ perceived empathy, trust, and satisfaction. Methods: This study adopted a mixed factorial experimental design. Independent variables included nonverbal behaviors (facial expressions: smiling/painful; body postures: open/closed) and verbal behaviors (speech rate and pitch: low/medium/high). Dependent variables included perceived empathy, trust, and satisfaction. Speech rate served as a between-subjects variable and pitch as a within-subjects variable. 75 participants were recruited to watch and interact with the 12 pre-recorded ECA videos presented in a random order. Perceived empathy, trust and satisfaction were measured. Results: Body postures significantly affected satisfaction (p< .001), while facial expressions showed no significant impact (p=.302). Speech rate significantly influenced satisfaction (p=.034), with low rate yielding higher satisfaction than high rate (p= .044); pitch showed no significant main effect (p=.295). Trust fully mediated the relationship between nonverbal behaviors and satisfaction, while empathy and trust serially mediated this effect. Trust partially mediated speech characteristics’ effect on satisfaction. The combination of painful expression, open posture, low speech rate, and high pitch yielded significantly higher satisfaction than other conditions (p< .001). Conclusions: Open body postures and low speech rate directly enhanced patients’ satisfaction. Trust mediated the effects of both nonverbal behaviors and speech characteristics on satisfaction. The optimal combination of open postures, painful expressions, high pitch, and low speech rate most effectively improved patient satisfaction. These findings provides empirical evidence for multimodal medical ECA design and enhancing digital health service experience.

E-commerce packaging provides a physical touchpoint through which consumers encounter a brand and form impressions of its products. Guided by the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) framework, this study examined how opening mechanisms and visual configurations incorporating brand logo information and printing approaches relate to consumer evaluations and purchase intention in cosmetic e-commerce packaging. A 2 × 3 fully within-subjects experiment involved 41 participants, each of whom opened and evaluated all six packaging conditions. Word associations and questionnaire ratings were collected, and the ratings were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA and within-subject mediation models with adjustments for multiple testing. Hand-opening elicited higher perceived opening fluency, perceived product quality, perceived brand image, and purchase intention than tool-assisted opening. For perceived product quality, perceived brand image, and purchase intention, the offset-printed configuration with a white logo on a black background received the highest ratings, followed by the watermark-printed configuration with a black logo on natural cardboard and the unbranded, unprinted configuration. These differences concern the configurations as tested, because brand logo presence, printing approach, and color were not independently manipulated. Mediation analyses suggest that consumers’ perceptions of the enclosed product’s quality may partly explain why hand-opening packaging is associated with higher purchase intention. The findings contribute to the contextual application of the S-O-R framework and provide guidance for cosmetic brands considering hand-opening mechanisms and printed brand information in packaging design.