Service design to evoke users’ enthusiasm —proposal and evaluation of a museum information providing service

In psychology, users’ enthusiasm for products or services is considered to be a type of intrinsic motivation. From the viewpoints of emotion, cognition, and ability, Hunt suggested that enthusiasm is evoked when users’ perceive an adequate gap between their own characteristics and those of an object. Our previous study reported objective methods for detecting intrinsic motivation and quantifying a psychological gap. In this study, we experimentally produced a service that exposed each user to an adequate psychological gap from his characteristics, and conducted a scientific evaluation. In particular, by focusing on the case of an information service at a museum, we correlated the observational and subjective data of the participants’ reaction to the service. The results of the analysis of the participants’ behavior, blink rate, variation in the regional cerebral blood volume suggest that users’ enthusiasm can be increased to a greater extent by applying a scientific method to compute an adequate gap from each person’s characteristics.