Online Shopping and Individual Consumer Adaptation: The Relationship Between Fabric-Identification Ability and Prior Knowledge

This chapter describes the adaptation of individual consumers with regard to shopping for clothes online. Consumers who shop online are sometimes disappointed if the textural and tactile properties of purchased clothing differ from their expectations. However, some observers can determine cloth quality quite well from an image. Understanding how such observers identify fabric is critical for developing a technology for presenting cloth information that is adaptable for each observer. To accomplish this, we performed a fabric-identification experiment in which we asked 18 observers to distinguish pieces of cloth through blind tactile perception while viewing cloth images on a display. We also conducted a questionnaire survey to quantify each observer’s knowledge of fabrics, experience, and interest by using polar questions and visual analog scales (VASs). From these results, the relationship between fabric-identification ability and prior knowledge was investigated for each observer.