In the past, research on human–technology interaction has almost exclusively concentrated on aspects of usefulness and usability. Despite the success of this line of research, its narrow perspective has recently become a target for criticism. To explain why people prefer some systems over others, factors such as aesthetic qualities and emotional experiences play an important role in addition to instrumental aspects. In the following, we report three experiments that illustrate the importance of such factors. In the first experiment, we study the role of emotions in human–technology interaction by using Scherer's (1984) component theory of emotions as a theoretical foundation. A combination of methods is derived from that theory and employed to measure subjective feelings, motor expressions, physiological reactions, cognitive appraisals, and behaviour. The results demonstrate that the manipulation of selected system properties may lead to differences in usability that affect emotional user reactions. The second experiment investigates the interplay of instrumental and non‐instrumental system qualities. The results show that users' overall appraisal of a technical device is influenced by both groups of qualities. In the third experiment, we join the approaches of the first two studies to analyse the influence of usability and aesthetics within a common design. The results indicate that systems differing in these aspects affect the perception of instrumental and non‐instrumental qualities as well as the users' emotional experience and their overall appraisal of the system. Summarizing our results, we present a model specifying three central components of user experience and their interrelations (CUE‐Model). The model integrates the most important aspects of human–technology interaction and hints at a number of interesting issues for future research.

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Abstract. The study of users' emotional behavior as an important aspect of the user experience has been receiving increasing attention for the past few years. In this paper we discuss the multi-component character of emotions and its consideration in the area of human-technology interaction. Based on the approach proposed by Scherer [1], various aspects of emotions were investigated in an interactive context: subjective feelings, physiological activation, motor expression, cognitive appraisals, and behavioral tendencies. In an experiment emotion-related changes were detected for a number of emotional components by using a variety of methods: rating scales for subjective feelings, electromyography of facial muscles, heart rate, electrodermal activity, performance data and questionnaires on cognitive appraisals. Results are discussed with respect to the correlation between the components and their associated methods. We suggest that a combination of methods provides a comprehensive basis for analyzing emotions as an aspect of the user experience.

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Quality aspects of an interactive system that address user needs that go beyond users' instrumental needs are one important area for user experience research. Two categories of non-instrumental qualities seem to be important: aesthetic and symbolic aspects. In an explorative study the role of different dimensions of non-instrumental quality and their influence on overall judgements, like beauty or goodness of an interactive product, were studied. Four digital audio players were used to get information on users' perception of instrumental and non-instrumental quality perceptions as well as overall judgements. The results show the importance of various non-instrumental quality aspects and point out the need for further research.