(The) effects of the usability of products on user’s emotions

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to reveal the influence of usability on human emotions by analyzing the user’s emotional changes while using a product. Therefore, I measured the user’s emotional changes while they interact with a product. In this research, I have extracted 88 emotional words that can come up while people use a product and reveal emotional changes not words that were derived simply from the product’s appearance. And then using factor analysis, I categorized the extracted emotional words to form the 6 representative emotions: Aesthetics, Satisfaction in Usability, Novelty, Uncomfortableness, Pleasure, Excellence. Through this, I have come up with a suitable set of Subjective Evaluation Scale for measuring user’s emotions expressed while using a product. Using the Subjective Evaluation Scale, I developed a tool that effectively measures the user’s emotions expressed while using a product and that can complement the limitations of the psychological measuring method. The developed software named VideoTAME (Video Think Aloud for Measuring Emotion), basically asks the subject to watch a recorded video clip of the user performing a specific task and to examine the emotional changes that had occurred. Using emotion logging software VideoTAME, I measured a user’s emotions expressed while using a product through experiment. This was to find how the usability of a product can effect the user’s emotion. The major findings of this experiment can be summarized by the following; Negative emotions such as Uncomforatbleness was expressed more often in tasks that were difficult to perform due to problems in usability, and positive emotions such as Satisfaction in Usability were expressed more in tasks that did not have problems in usability and were easy; The user’s emotional changes during product use are evoked by the situations at the moment of performing tasks rather than by the overall attribute of the tasks; During product use, users were more sensitive t...