Emotions and User Interface Design Focused on Web Pages

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of web user's emotional reactions to different designs of web pages and the influence of badly designed web pages on its users. There is a detailed analysis of the common mistakes the designers make and the do's and dont's of web designing to create a user friendly, enjoyable web pages. A list of 50 points – based on the usability design guidelines is drawn that would be helpful in designing effective, easy to use web pages. Based on the design guidelines few web pages were designed, tested for usability features and finally subjected to user evaluation. The different stages of the research undertaken are: exploration of the theories of emotion in the psychological science, modeling of the emotional concerns about interfaces(web pages), testing of the different websites with different evaluation methods-automatic test tools, emotional interface evaluation of poorly designed and better web pages (online surveys based on usability). The evaluation shows the user’s emotional responses towards different types of interfaces, highlighting the emotional improvements in users when browsing through a better designed web page. Finally a road map is drawn to illustrate the sequence of steps to be followed to pass the emotional interface evaluation.