A Unified Model for Haptic Experience

Designed haptic feedback—technology-mediated touch feedback—has the potential to mediate positive and meaningful experiences. These experiences are rich and complex in nature and thus challenging to design. Established User Experience (UX) and Haptic Experience (HX) models describe the design of experiences; however, they are too general and evaluation-focused to inform haptic experience design. We review 104 publications designing haptic experiences and analyse how researchers consider pragmatic, hedonic, and eudaimonic qualities of haptic experience. Our findings show that researchers mainly engage with the pragmatic qualities of the experience. We thus propose a unified model for HX for understanding the design of haptic experiences, combining key elements of UX and HX research to give haptic designers a tool for thinking about the rich and complex haptic experiences elicited by their designs. This raises open questions for haptic experience research, as designing mediated touch experiences through haptic technology remains challenging.