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   Definition, quantification, design
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Definition, quantification, design...   • What is it? • Can you quantify it? • Can you design towards it? • Selected article references

What is it?
In short, you are able to improve the quality of a user interface by paying attention to how much users like it.
Major news to you? Hopefully not...

But perhaps the notion of emotional usability is new to you. Whereas everybody ideally tries to create the very best user interfaces for their users, it is often done based on a large degree of task-orientation.

There´s usually plenty of focus on issues like

• “Can the user quickly find what he/she wants?”

but often rather less focus on issues like

• “Does the user like finding what he/she wants, and does he/she like it when he/she finds it?”

Despite the fact that feelings are subjective, this is actually surprising. Not that you should stop conducting “old school” usability tests, but research shows that you can significantly improve user preference for your products or services if deliberately targeting user emotions through your user interface design.
A realistic design target could be 25% more trustworthy for a banking or other secure communications user interface. I´ve tried that target for a re-design, and reached it. And no, the user interface wasn´t particularly bad before I started.

But lets´s start at the beginning:

First I did some research, and I found some interesting articles.
It turned out that focusing on emotional usability when designing user interfaces can significantly

• make customers prefer your interfaces to others
• make your users trust your product or service more than others
• make users perceive your solution as more enjoyable and fun to work with
• etc.

In one article, Hassenzahl et al. (2001) argue that the narrow definition of usability as merely the complement of utility has strong limitations, because it allows a product to be usable but not useful and because it neglects the usage context (tasks, social and psychological factors, etc.).
But, Hassenzahl claims, even a broader definition of usability as quality of use may neglect “the contribution of perceived fun and enjoyment to user satisfaction and preferences” (Hassenzahl, 2001, p. 2).
Hassenzahl and his partners therefore suggest “a model taking hedonic quality (i.e. non-task-oriented quality aspects such as innovativeness, originality, etc.) and the subjective nature of appealingness into account” (Hassenzahl, 2001, p. 2).

Kim and Moon (1998, p. 4) found that it was “especially important to take the informative function of emotions into account when designing human-computer interfaces,” because “the interface may elicit a variety of emotions, ranging from the basic affective feelings, such
as joy or fear, to non-basic feelings, such as trustworthiness or sophistication.” They found indications that “the various types of feelings all influence decision making”, and that “therefore, the feelings evoked by the human-computer interface can also affect the quality of decision making in using [a] computer system.”

Fogg and Tseng (1999) highlight the importance of credibility in computing products. They define credibility as “a perceived quality”, which is why “in discussing the credibility of a computer product, one is always discussing the perception of credibility.” They identify two main components of credibility: trustworthiness, the dimension capturing the “perceived goodness or morality of the source,” and expertise, the dimension capturing “the perceived knowledge and skill of the source” (all p. 80).

Credibility, then, is important because the amount of credibility relates to the amount of trustworthiness and expertise an organisation has.
But equally important is it that the users get the feeling that the organisation has employed its trustworthiness and expertise, by having its user interface designers, its technical writers, its usability testers, etc. pay close attention to users and users´ contexts and integrate this knowledge in all of their work.

Ask your marketing department whether they pay any special attention to maintaining customer relationships. They probably do.
Then ask them if they are willing to go out of their way to make customers feel they get that little bit extra from your products or services, compared to the competition´s. They probably are, because adding value, maintaining relations and exceeding expectations are essential factors in their world.

There are many parallels between such relationship marketing and designing towards emotional usability.

Can you quantify it?
Focusing on emotional usability when designing user interfaces can make customers prefer your interfaces to others, make your users feel more comfortable, help raise users´ adoption rates and flatten their learning curves, etc.
Improved customer preference and user acceptance ought to be good for your sales, and it just might reduce your support burden too.

But abstract, qualitative issues usually don´t go very far at planning or budget meetings. Concrete, quantifiable issues usually fare a lot better. So can you quantify the sum of soft issues that can improve your user interfaces, and thus justify spending time working on emotional usability?

Yes. Various self-report techniques used in combination with prototypes, mockups or even just paper sketches are ideal for quantifying emotion. For example

• the Differential Emotions Scale, where you measure the intensity of subjects´ emotions, or
• Semantic Differential, where you employ polarized pairs of terms describing emotion and are thus able to measure both the intensity and the direction of subjects´ emotions.

The main research objective of Kim and Moon (1998, p. 3) was to “formulate and evaluate a systematic methodology for the design of customer interfaces that explicitly aim to generate certain target feelings in the customer while interacting with electronic commerce systems.”

Kim and Moon used the Semantic Differential technique when quantifying emotional usability in their prototypes for banking software, because of the technique´s “association with the multidimensional approach to emotions adopted in the design of emotion-generating interfaces,” (p. 5) as had earlier been discovered by kansei engineers designing commercially successful physical products, such as cars, pagers, etc.

The semantic differential method was also applied by Hassenzahl et al. (2000) when evaluating prototypes at Siemens, although they do recommend not restricting one´s research to the quantitative methods presented in their study, but rather complement it by qualitative approaches.

Fogg and Tseng (1999) furthermore suggest threshold and spectral evaluation methods for measuring perceived qualities and user acceptance.
Due to the relative qualitativeness of these methods, in particular of the spectral method, I find that they may not, if used alone, yield the amount of hard evidence often required in software development organisations. But used in conjunction with other more quantitative, tangible outcome-oriented, methods, they may work well.

Can you design towards it?
Kim and Moon (1998, p. 22) found through their research that is was “possible to elicit target emotions in a majority of subjects, thus making it possible to design emotive interfaces for widespread use.” They found that particularly the use (or non-use) of graphic design elements, colour and contrast had significant effects on the formation of user perceptions of their banking software prototypes, and that even slight variations in colour shades evoked noticeably different emotions.

Even though Kim and Moon focused mainly on graphic design elements, and even though their research should be weighed against their specific prototypes as well as the cultural background of their research environment and subjects, their methodology can certainly be applied in other settings.

I believe you can successfully design towards emotional usability in user interfaces, and successfully mix the approach with Gestalt grouping and form perception phenomena (like proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, area and symmetry) as well as other more task-oriented usability guidelines.

When doing a complete re-design of the browser-based user interfaces of Eicon Network´s Safepipe Virtual Private Networking products (trusting the system is paramount to users of such systems – and to the decision makers who authorize their acquisition), I used parts of Kim and Moon´s methodology, including the Semantic Differential technique, in combination with Gestalt techniques.

Their methodology, originally developed to investigate the possibility of inducing target emotions though the design of banking interfaces, suited my needs well as it particularly focused on determining and designing towards factors that would create the feeling of system trustworthiness among users. I achieved some really good results.

Selected article references