The perceived importance of sensory modalities in product usage: a study of self-reports

Although popular belief holds that vision dominates human experience, this does not necessarily imply that people regard vision as the most important sensory modality during the interaction with every product. Instead, the relative importance of the different modalities is likely to depend on the type of product and on the task performed. In Study 1, respondents reported how important they found vision, audition, touch, taste, and smell during the use of 45 different products. In Study 2, the respondents answered a similar question for the evaluation of the safety, ease of use, and enjoyment experienced for 15 products. Importance ratings for the sensory modalities differed considerably between the products. Differences due to the types of evaluations were smaller. Averaged over products and evaluation types, vision was the most important sensory modality for product evaluations, followed by touch, smell, audition, and taste. However, for about half of the individual products, the importance ratings for vision were lower than for one of the other modalities. These findings are in line with the view that vision is regarded the dominant modality, because it plays an important part in many and an irrelevant part in virtually no product experiences.