Eliciting user preference for quantitative vs. emotional information display in eco-feedback designs

Eco-feedback is a design strategy that reminds users of their resource consumption as they use a product. The ultimate goal is to promote pro-environmental behaviors in users by making them aware of the environmental impact of their consumption. The way these designs present resource usage information can significantly impact user perceptions. This paper investigates two aspects of resource usage presentation, quantitative feedback and emotional evocativeness, by evaluating 32 designs spanning electricity, materials, transportation, and water via surveys of 619 university students in the US and Saudi Arabia. Both these aspects are positively correlated with perceived product appeal and perceived effectiveness in encouraging sustainable behavior. It was found that presenting quantitative resource usage information was more helpful to respondents who could better estimate resource consumption, while the emotional evocativeness of a design aided respondents with lower and higher resource consumption knowledge to a similar degree. In addition, we found that images of living creatures and strong visual cues evoked strong emotions in users. Female participants, in general, responded more strongly than males to this emotional evocativeness. These experimental findings cast light on how to better design eco-feedback products to be more widely accepted.