Understanding customers across national cultures: The influence of national cultural differences on designers’ empathic accuracy
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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
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en
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21
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Journal of Engineering Design, Volume 32, issue 10, pp. 538-558
Abstract
For engineering design to be successful, it is essential to understand customer experience and identify customer needs. However, it is challenging to understand customers, especially those from different national cultures. The empathy literature suggests that having similar experiences to another person can help understand them better. This study adopts an empathy measure from psychology for use in a project where designers attempt to understand customers’ driving experiences in different countries and identify their needs for detecting road hazards. We quantify designers’ empathic accuracy and the correctness of their rating of customers’ emotional tone. The results show that national cultural differences significantly affect the accuracy of designers’ empathic understanding but do not impact their understanding of customers’ emotional tone.Description
Funding Information: This work is supported by CSC (Chinese Scholarship Council), the ‘Future Makers’ grant of the Technology Industries of Finland Centennial Foundation and Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation. We also wish to thank Professor Kari Tammi, Xiaoqi Feng, and all the participants for their help. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
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Li, J, Surma-aho, A, Chang-Arana, Á M & Hölttä-Otto, K 2021, 'Understanding customers across national cultures: The influence of national cultural differences on designers’ empathic accuracy', Journal of Engineering Design, vol. 32, no. 10, pp. 538-558. https://doi.org/10.1080/09544828.2021.1928022