It has been an exciting week and it’s only Wednesday afternoon! The time to perform the experiment is approaching. I applied for forty participants at the university today and it’s expected they will be performing the experiment in a lab in the first weeks of February. Next week I will make a post to invite you in joining the online-experiment as a second test group of designers (or people with more experience in the field of design for emotion).

Yesterday I had a meeting with my mentors. I have these meetings once a month and all mentors seem to be very interested in the project. I’m always looking forward to these meetings as they usually evolve into interesting discussions about the work I did. Yesterday we solved the issues I had about the experiment (some of these issues have already been presented in an earlier post). The experiment has evolved in something really interesting and I’m looking forward to the results.
Allow me to introduce the people who guide me through the project.
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I’m currently in the middle of preparing the first experiment, with not much to show of it right now. Therefore, I want to present an interesting research by Eleanor Loiacono who developed Webqual with her colleagues: A tool to measure the quality of a website. They identified 4 categories composed of 12 constructs to predict consumer revisit and purchase actions for B2C (Business-to-Consumer) websites. The influence of the constructs on these two ‘succes factors’ for B2C sites are presented in the table below.

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Back from a great week of ice-skating, sun, fun, food and sauna I’ll present the setup of my first experiment.

The Objective of the experiment is to determine whether the two dimensions (arousal and value) as found in Russel’s work are sufficient to describe web experience. Van Gorp translated the dimensions pleasure-displeasure and activation-deactivation into pleasant-unpleasant and anxiety-boredom to develop interface design guidelines. The dimensions can be placed on a circumplex and Desmet filled them in with discrete emotions (as shown in the figure below). Expected is that when users indicate a position on this circumplex, the discrete emotions on that spot give a pretty reliable impression of the experienced emotions.

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It has been quiet around here this week due to illness and it will also be quiet next week, but for a completely different reason… my annual ice-skating trip to Collalbo (Northern Italy).

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Marc Hassenzahl (2004) performed an interesting research on the interplay of beauty, goodness and usability in interactive products.
Hassenzahl explains user experience as the combination of product characters with personal expectations and standards. A product character is a bundle of attributes, such as innovative, comprehensible, or professional. The product character brings up expectations and exists of two distinct attribute groups: pragmatic and hedonic attributes.

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At the moment I am preparing my first experiment in the development process of the tool. This experiment is mainly about the aesthetic appeal of the website and will be based on two previous studies. I will cover them both in short.

Attention web designers: you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression! Continue Reading »

Expressive facial reaction
The research area of facial expressions and emotions has a long history. In 1872 Darwin argued that certain emotional expressions are innate and the same for all people. Later evidence has indisputably shown that facial expressions are related to emotion both biologically and culturally. James and Tomkins promoted the idea that the feelings of emotions arise from the perception of characteristic bodily changes. For instance, if one smiles he or she will interpret this smile as a sign of feeling happy. Other psychologists disagree and state that the face says something about a person’s internal state. Ekman states that facial expression is only one of the factors providing information, next to factors as heart rate and blood pressure. Fridland thinks of facial expressions as tools for influencing social interactions; a smile may encourage people to approach while a scowl may warn people to stay away. Russel & Fernandez-Dols think it more likely that facial expressions tell others something about the overall character of a person’s mood and context then provides details about specific emotions.

As you may notice, there are many different theories, but all researchers acknowledge a certain link between affective states and facial expression.

FACS

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Trevor van Gorp uses the psychological dimension of emotional states from Russell in his master thesis. In this project he uses emotion, arousal, attention and flow chaining emotional states to improve HCI.

Arousal & Performance
Arousal can be defined as the range between anxiety and boredom and is combined with the dimension of value. Positive affect promotes creative thinking and is linked with the tendency to approach. Negative affect promotes more detail-oriented thinking and is linked with the tendency to avoid. Emotions persuade us to direct our attention to one piece of information over another. The intensity level of the emotion often determines the strength and focus of attention.

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Sylvia Tzvetanova is one of the few researchers I found that proposed a model of interface elements influencing web experience. She makes a distinction between insite factors and outsite factors. Insite factors are characteristics inside the website that may influence user’s emotion. Outsite factors are characteristics outside the website that may influence user’s emotion.
At the moment I will not explain the different elements as I’m trying to explore each of them first. However, in a later stage I will surely come back to them.

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