Measuring the effect of survey question types in Korea on the respondents’ emotional reaction on IT products

The traditional IT product design focused on the most optimized physical functions and economic feasibility. However, the trends are changing to adopt an emotional design into research and development by measuring and analyzing the human beings’ emotion. Many emotion design studies on IT products measure users’ emotion through the survey questionnaire with emotion words. Therefore, structuring and organizing survey question items are critical. The objective of this study is to find an effect of different survey question types on emotion evaluation of the websites, which can be referred to as an example of IT products. In order to achieve the objective, this study measured the emotion level of the website users by applying different question items with different sentence lengths and expression types for the same website. This study found that different question type has no significant effect on human emotion evaluation. The findings from this study are a lot different from the research reported in the literature outside the Korea. This implies that additional research might be necessary by considering the cross-cultural factors into question types when developing the survey questionnaire for Korean.