Usability and user emotions
Hey folks! So I have taken up the “User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide” course from Interaction Design Foundation, and it’s pretty interesting and useful. The course’s challenges are that you should answer the questions after each lesson(either by choosing an answer or writing a short response).
The first challenge was this question below:
Usability is part of User Experience Design that refers to the ease of access and/or use of a product or website. In one or two short paragraphs, please reflect on how the usability of a product affects the emotional experience of the product.
My response to it was:
Humans are both emotional and logical creatures, so either good or bad usability causes positive and negative emotional experiences accordingly.
Let’s see how usability can have an impact on user emotional experiences:
- When users achieve their goals easily and fast, the brain produces dopamine, which gives them feelings of pleasure, motivation, and triumph, they feel positive emotions.
- When users can not complete an action, it usually leads to self-deprecation and negative emotions.
- When the product is aesthetically beautiful, its usage is more pleasurable and therefore usable (Aesthetic Usability Effect).
- When users have a wide range of items to choose from, they spend more time on choosing something(Hick’s Law) and can feel negative emotions.
We can count this list on and on, but the key point is that usability shapes the emotional experience of the product, and it can either make it or break it.
You can further dig into usability and its impact on user emotions here: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/usability-a-part-of-the-user-experience?r=mary-10
