This blog is no longer updated by Kevin. He has finished his Master project and did a great job.

If you are interested in learning more about the LEMtool, please visit www.lemtool.com.

This will be my final post on the LEMtool blog. I finished my masters Industral Design Enigneering last friday; which means my part of the project ends. Therefore, in a few weeks time this blog will go offline. However, a brand new website about the LEMtool has recently been launched by Monito. You should certainly take a look at it to see the end of my research study and the beginning of a new (and hopefully succesful) tool!

Thanks all for reading my blog and for those interested: you can keep following me on my personal website which will be updated soon.

I’m off enjoying my free time!

Regards,
Kevin

A few weeks ago my second experiment was performed by 86 students of the University of Twente. The goal was to measure the (emotional) interaction experience of websites. In order to accomplish this, each student had to rate two different versions of a room search website.

The presented information (content) and the interaction path were the same for both websites. The websites differed on 2 other aspects. Continue Reading »

Our paper ‘Measuring the Emotional Impact of Websites: A Study on Combining a Dimensional and Discrete Emotion Approach in Measuring Visual Appeal of University Websites’ about the first experiment has been accepted for the DPPI 2007 conference!

After treating the instrumental qualites from Mahlke’s model, it is time to describe the non-instrumental qualites. Mahlke describes these qualities as ‘the quality aspects of an interactive system that address user needs that go beyond tasks, goals and their efficient achievement’. Over the past few years, various dimensions of non-instrumental qualities were discussed. Four of them are presented below.

Pat Jordan makes a distinction in the levels of pleasure a product evokes. According to Jordan pleasure in the context of products can be defined as the emotional, hedonic and practical benefits associated with products. It is one step further in the hierarchy of needs (functionality – usability – pleasure). Jordan suggests four different kinds of pleasure: physiological, social, psychological and ideological pleasure. These pleasures are the result of the relationships and interactions between a person and a product. Continue Reading »

The most important instrumental quality is usability; a term that is used to denote that a design is ‘good’ from a HCI point of view. Many usability tests are available to test usability aspects after development. Next to that a great amount of design guidelines and heuristics are available to design for usability. These guidelines and test will not be used by me, as the measuring of usability is not (yet) an important aspect of the tool. Therefore a model for usability by van Welie is presented to give a quick overview of this instrumental quality.

Continue Reading »

It has been a while since my last post, so here is the start of a new series of posts. I’m currently preparing my second (and final) experiment where I’ll try to measure the effect of website interaction on emotional experience. I’m busy creating the stimuli (websites) for the test, which I enjoy doing as I missed ‘being creative’. All the statistical stuff, the writing and the reading of the past months was very interesting to do, but hey… I’m still a designer.

As said, I’ve been reading a lot lately and I’ll try to sum up some interesting findings. I used a model as proposed by Sascha Mahlke for emotional experience in interactive contexts as the basis of my second experiment: The Components of User Experience (CUE) Model. I will explain the model in this post and in the next few weeks I’ll elaborate about the various elements.

Continue Reading »

We’ve just finished writing the paper for the Pleasurable Products and Interfaces’ conference, so it’s time to present some results. For now, I will post three scoring cards for the visual appeal of websites. The three websites clearly differ as the first is experienced as positive and the second as negative. The top 10 of emotion words related to the websites indicate a strong relation with the position on the circular structure. The last website elicits mixed feelings and has both positive and negative evaluations.

Continue Reading »

The experiment closed today. In three weeks time the server registered a total of 90 completed tests and 17.000 rated emotion words. I’m very satisfied with these numbers. A big thanks to you all who took the time and effort to participate, I known the test wasn’t easy. Next week I’ll contact the participant who won the book.

Yesterday I started analysing the results and they look very promising for the validity of the tool. I’m currently involved in writing a paper about the experiment with Marco van Hout and Thea van der Geest for the ‘Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces’ conference. The deadline is the 28th of February, so you’ll understand I’m pretty busy until then. After finishing the paper I will write a blog with a summary of the results. This will be at the end of next week.

Until then and thanks again!
Kevin

The time has come to present the online version of my first experiment. In the mean time I’m planning the experiment in a lab setting for a second group of psychology students from the University of Twente. This experiment will start next Tuesday (the 6th).

I’d like to invite you in joining the experiment. It will take approximately 20/25 minutes of your time and you have the opportunity to win a copy of the Designing Interactions book by Bill Moggridge. It’s a great book with interesting interviews and nice pictures; definitely worthwhile.
I hope you will take the time to participate in the Dutch or English version of the test.

Thanks in advance!

Oh, and in case you missed the link to the test… HERE it is again.