Emotional user experience : Traits, events, and states

Emotional experience has become an important topic in human–technology interaction research and design. Nevertheless, such research and design often lacks a proper explanatory basis and methodologically robust operationalisation. In this article, a conceptualisation of emotional user experience is formulated based on the appraisal theory of emotion, where the goal congruence of the interaction events and the task-independent individual traits are thought to underlie the user′s emotional response. A laboratory study with N=50 participants conducting ordinary computer tasks is reported. The results suggest that subjective emotional experience depends on a number of factors relating to individ…

Emotional Dimensions of User Experience ? A User Psychological Analysis

User psychology is a human–technology interaction research approach that uses psychological concepts, theories, and findings to structure problems of human–technology interaction. As the notion of user experience has become central in human–technology interaction research and in product development, it is necessary to investigate the user psychology of user experience. This analysis of emotional human–technology interaction is based on the psychological theory of basic emotions. Three studies, two laboratory experiments, and one field study are used to investigate the basic emotions and the emotional mind involved in user experience. The first and second experiments study the measurement of…

Bayesian parameter inference for cognitive simulators

Appraisal and Mental Contents in Human-Technology Interaction

User experience has become a key concept in investigating human-technology interaction. Therefore it has become essential to consider how user experience can be explicated using psychological concepts. Emotion has been widely considered to be an important dimension of user experience, and one obvious link between modern psychology and the analysis of user experience assumes the analysis of emotion in interaction processes. In this paper, the focus is on the relationship between action types and elicited emotional patterns. In three experiments including N = 40 participants each, it is demonstrated that the types of emotions experienced when people evaluate and use technical artefacts differ…

Appraisals of Salient Visual Elements in Web Page Design

Visual elements in user interfaces elicit emotions in users and are, therefore, essential to users interacting with different software. Although there is research on the relationship between emotional experience and visual user interface design, the focus has been on the overall visual impression and not on visual elements. Additionally, often in a software development process, programming and general usability guidelines are considered as the most important parts of the process. Therefore, knowledge of programmers’ appraisals of visual elements can be utilized to understand the web page designs we interact with. In this study, appraisal theory of emotion is utilized to elaborate the relati…

Aesthetic Appeal and Visual Usability in Four Icon Design Eras

Technological artefacts express time periods in their visual design. Due time, visual culture changes and thus affects the design of pictorial representations in technological products, such as icons in user interfaces. Previous research of temporal aspects in human-computer interaction has been focusing on particular interaction situations, but not on the effects of design eras on user experience. The influence of icon design styles of different eras on aesthetic and usability experiences was studied with the method of primed product comparisons. Affective preferences and their processing times were analysed in order to examine visual usability in terms of semantic distance and aesthetic a…