Deep understanding of user experience--affective design

Whether you are designing a website or an item, the relationship is based on the usefulness, availability, and pleasure that we experience. Ultimately, we build relationships with products and services based on the same reasons that we build relationships with others.

Source: Translation Words


Translator: Shuchenman


Original Author: Trevor van Gorp

As a user experience professional, we are trying to design an engaging experience. These experiences help to establish a good relationship between the products we create and the users who use those products. Whether you are designing a website or an item, the relationship is based on the usefulness, availability, and pleasure that we experience. Ultimately, we build relationships with products and services based on the same reasons that we build relationships with others.

pleasing products are attractive and will make us feel good. Attractive people have the same effect. The products available are easy to interact with and easy to understand. The same is true of talkative people. Useful products to meet our needs, and in the long term let us get emotional satisfaction. Long-term relationships can meet physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual needs. http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/12151.html "> The definition of affective design

Some time ago, I took my friend's car home from work. I got into her SUV and sat down, waiting to drive. A few minutes later, an annoying beep began to ring. "Oh," she said, "You have to fasten your seatbelt so that this maddening voice stops." I reluctantly fastened my seatbelt and the sound stopped. The sound of the Beep completed its mission; I fastened my seatbelt.

This is an example of affective design. Affective design is designed to capture the user's attention, induce emotional responses (consciously or unconsciously) to improve the likelihood of performing specific actions. Emotional reactions can be consciously or unconsciously. For example, by influencing arousal levels (i.e., physiological stimuli), a button with a bright color can unconsciously capture the user's attention. The following behavior can be any action, such as clicking a button, registering for internal communications, or making an online purchase.

In order to stop the uncomfortable noises in my friend's SUV, I had to do something specific. In this case, the unpleasant beep is stimulation, it causes my boredom and makes me fasten my seatbelt. For your recent Web application, the stimulus is probably visual rather than auditory, but it controls the same energy. One common denominator of these stimuli is that they need and control your attention.

Note

Attention is described as a mental energy. Like the traditional energy, you can't work without it, and work consumes it. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) names the mental and emotional state of our attention fully focused on the current activity as "flow". Flow is a highly input experience, strong emotional input needs and narrow the user's attention. In order for users to complete their thinking and reach the stream, we need to capture and maintain their attention by designing a design that affects their emotional experience.

The products we design need to use their look and sound to attract users, (through their experience) to persuade them to approach or avoid. They also need to communicate with users. The interactive approach of these products should persuade users to take specific actions in predetermined order, while giving the user a sense of control. If we do the right thing, the user will put into our system and make a deal with it, they click on the button, subscribe to the newsletter, make a purchase or book a ticket.

These events mark the establishment of a relationship between a user and a product or application. Each experience of a company's products or services shapes the relationship between the user and the company's brand. To establish a positive brand relationship, the company needs to effectively manage the emotional response of users each time they meet with a company product or service. As we're about to see, people tend to express intuition as a personality trait, and our personality traits determine the relationship we build.

Emotional Dimension

To understand how emotional expression becomes a personality, we first need to understand the emotions themselves. We can use two potential dimensions to describe all emotional or emotional states, that is, values (value) and arousal (arousal). Value judgment refers to the judgment of the quality of things. We usually form these conscious judgments based on whether or not things make us happy.

Arousal is the unconscious activation of the body, the brain, or a particular action. People use anxiety (anxiety) to define the level of boredom (boredom), and we can measure it by heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and skin electricity. In short, you can view arousal as a level of stimulation or activation. We combine the two dimensions of emotion (i.e., consciousness/cognition and unconsciousness/physiology) to get a circular model of emotions.

diagram: The annular model of emotion (Van Gorp, 2006 adapted from Russell, 1980)

Since arousal is largely unconscious, it provides a particularly powerful way for designers to control attention and influence behavior. For example, large size pictures, bright saturated colors, and high contrast can improve arousal levels. Increase the size of the picture, so that the elements closer to the screen can improve the level of arousal. But when the level of arousal increases, the scope of attention narrows and points to any object of concern. An excellent example is the parking sign, in the complex visual environment of the street, bright red can catch our attention well.

In the process of product development, it often leads to a disconnect between design, marketing and usability for such reasons. 10243.html "> Visual designers and marketers often raise arousal levels by inducing emotional attention (the effects of bright colors and full-sized images), while usability analysts control arousal levels and reduce negative emotions by ensuring that tasks are completed.

Behavior Dimension

Different dimensions of emotion affect different aspects of behavior. The dimension of value affects whether we are approaching (that is, pleasure) or avoidance (i.e. pain) of an object, and the awakening latitude affects the motivation for doing things. Both pleasing and unpleasant objects and experiences raise our level of arousal. For example, fear and excitement are high arousal emotions. Arousal levels can also affect the degree to which we experience a particular emotion, and the stronger the emotion, the more attention we need. Arousal levels can also affect motivational levels. Low anxiety or boredom leads to low motivation, and higher anxiety leads to higher motivation. The level of anxiety increases to the optimal level (i.e. flow), after which the motivation and performance are lower and anxiety increases.

diagram: A circular model of behavior and motivation (adapted from Russell, 19803 van Gorp, 20064)

For the annoying sound of my friend's SUV, its value latitude is negative (that is, not pleasant). This unpleasant feeling will have the urge to avoid. If the volume of sound increases, or the frequency of beeps increases, my arousal level is unconsciously raised to further improve my motivation to avoid the sound or to stop it.

This is a simple example of a car in a relatively controlled environment, but what happens in more levels or more complex environments? What happens to visual design and interactive design? As we are about to see, this simple emotional expression is perceived as personality.

Emotion and personality

Human beings are such social animals that we can perceive emotional expression from anything, including products, objects, and websites. As the product is usually the same, over time this perceived emotion becomes perceived as a personality trait. The people we first met who looked depressed or sullen expressed sadness. When you meet him in the next 20 times you still look sad, you probably think he is "depressed". For products and websites, we can view personality as a long-term expression of a particular emotion.

As humans, we assign personalities to objects, interfaces, and the way they operate, and their attractiveness to our senses. While our sanity tells us that computers and the media have no life or feelings, we still respond in a social and automated manner when we browse, interact and evaluate them. We have shown that products should be seen as "the living objects in which people relate to each other." "People may feel happy or sad, angry or negative, relaxed or tense, proud or humiliated, motivated or not motivated by the relationships they use to create a product."

personality traits and relationship

Like perception, our first impressions of personality are based on information received through the senses (i.e., sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch). The formation of these impressions is rapid and unconscious. For Web sites and applications, people are inferred from the language that makes up the formal attributes of the design, user prompts, sounds, navigation, proportions, layouts, contrasts, colors, images, and fonts. In fact, the perception of personality is so automatic and unconscious that it happens regardless of whether the perception is appropriate or not. Moreover, more conscious judgments about personality are based on how the objects we interact with in the long term behave.

In interpersonal relationships, personality traits are an important part of attraction and dialogue. They shape our relationship by influencing the people we like and what we expect from the people we meet. They also affect the quality of our relationship with others. From this perspective, this is not the same as the personality we perceive from products and websites. However, unlike us, the personality of a product can exist in the virtual world and be controlled by the designers so that they appear at a specific time and place. They can be simpler, more consistent and easier to identify than real personalities, reducing uncertainty and building trust.

The dimension

of

personality

Although human personality traits are complex, psychologists classify product personalities into a small number of categories with similar characteristics. They divide the personality of products, computers, and interfaces into two main dimensions: dominant versus compliant (dominant vs. submissive), friendly to unfriendly (friendly vs.unfriendly).

Figure: The annular model of personality (adapted from Reeves & Nass, 19985; Van Gorp, 2006

Observe the following two simple objects. Are they expressing emotions? As static objects, any emotion they express will not change over time. If the main dimension of personality is friendliness and dominance, which object do you think is more friendly? Which is more dominant? Look at the comments people have left under the photos. Happiness is associated with friendliness, pleasure, and proximity, while sadness is associated with unfriendly, painful, and evasive behavior.

: Personality design personality: domination or obedience?

Dominant visual characteristics can be described as angular, direct, cold, dark, silvery, black ... and has a thick base. Submissive visual features can be described as round, warm, bright, clear, concise, soft and fine, and golden. If a personality does not manifest dominant visual or interactive characteristics, people tend to think it is more submissive. Which of the two sites in Figure 6 are more dominant and more compliant? Which is friendly and which is not friendly enough?

Chart: Martha Steward and wwe--compliant and dominant design

Note that you will be more naturally attracted to the two websites above. Which one do you think is more compelling to approach or avoid? Which more naturally captures more attention? To what extent do these sites match the personalities of their target audiences? Generally speaking, you can attract users by presenting a visual personality similar to the user's personality. To attract, we are attracted to things that look similar to us or the way we like to see ourselves.

friendly or unfriendly?

Friendly visual features can be described as positive, while unfriendly visual features can be described as negative. Friendliness depends not only on what is said, but also on the way it is spoken (i.e. the tone of the conversation). Our tendency to identify and describe personality based on dialogue can be easily found in the following examples. This example uses contrast, visual weight, color value, size, and typography to change the meaning conveyed by the language. Content conveys information, but the look and feel change the way information is interpreted, thus changing the meaning.

Which of the following statements would you prefer to talk to? Which one do you think is more compelling to approach or avoid? Which more naturally captures more attention? For dialogue, some people like to dominate, while opposites attract.

similarity and complementarity?

Similarity theory means that people are more likely to be attracted to individuals with similar personalities than individuals with different personalities. The theory of complementarity is that people are more likely to be attracted to individuals who match their own level of domination or obedience (Markey 20079; Personality Research10). This goes back to an old question, is it easier to get along with people or people of different people? The answer is yes.

When it comes to personality, something different at different stages of the relationship stimulates our emotions. The study found that, in the early stages of the relationship, similarity prevailed and played a key role in the initial attraction. Complementarity becomes more important as relationships deepen over time. In a long-term relationship, people are more content when their partners are more or less dominant. Two of dominant people may have conflicts because they want to be leaders, and two submissive people may lack initiative because they don't want to be leaders (Markey 20079; Wikipedia 2009).

Generally speaking, the interaction between the user and the system should be complementary, in which the user occupies a dominant position, and the product, interface or service occupy a subordinate position. The status of users and systems may be interchangeable in guided tours or in a system-specified step or authoritative application.

Conclusion

We understand that emotions can control attention. We also understand that the term affective design refers to the design designed to consciously capture the user's attention and induce emotional responses to improve the user's likelihood of making the desired behavior.

The value dimensions of emotions can affect our behavior (i.e., proximity or avoidance), while awakening dimensions affect our motivation to do things. Emotions affect different aspects of behavior, and over time people perceive emotional expression as a different personality. Values affect the perception of friendliness, and arousal affects the perception of dominance.

: Emotion, behavior/motivation and personality

Finally, we learned that customers are attracted to things that they feel are similar to their personalities. Over time, however, they like to interact with things that complement them. A useful, usable, and enjoyable experience facilitates the formation of relationships.