Usability, aesthetics and emotions in human–technology interaction

Abstract

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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