Sotopia Usability Consultancy Publishes Research Results on Emotional Design

Emotional design relies on the nature of the experience; it must accommodate beauty, brains, symmetry, elegance, simplicity, distinctiveness pleasure and usability. The main goal of this research is to try to scientifically systemize the nature of peoples emotions while interacting with the Web. As gathered from over 327 one-on-one in-depth interviews, this paper argues that design and aesthetics have an impact on peoples perception and motivation, and subsequently on the success of a website or online application.

(PRWEB) August 3, 2005 -- Emotional design has been gaining increasing attention in recent years. The use of appropriate design strategies to get people in a certain mood" about a product or a service is often adopted by marketing experts and designers. Emotional design, from this perspective, is what provides the person with the gut feeling" about a product or service. Its a gut feeling because we are all emotional, intuitive beings, despite our best efforts to be rational" a strong tacit feeling barely understood.

The work reported in this paper represents a research framework on integrating feelings and emotions" into graphical design to create trust and acquire loyalty while using web sites. How can we make people experience web site design in such a way that it makes them feel satisfied and creates a pleasurable online experience?

The main goal of this research is to try to, scientifically systemize, the nature of peoples emotions while interacting with the Web. As gathered from over 327 one-to-one in-depth interviews, this paper argues that design and aesthetics have an impact on peoples perception and motivation, and subsequently on the success of a website or online application.

The paper: "Emotional Design -- Designing for Satisfaction and Pleasure" was presented by Soraia Cardoso at the HCII2005 in Las Vegas last July. Soraia Cardoso is Usability Consultant and expert in emotional design at Sotopia Usability Consultancy (www.sotopia.com).

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