IRS 2019 EMOTX

Consumers today are confronted with a vast array of digital products through which they interact with businesses, profoundly impacting their user experience. Understanding user experience, a source of value and differentiation for companies, is of significant managerial and theoretical interest. This research project lies at the intersection of computer science, consumer behavior, and psychology. It contributes to the development of human-computer interfaces (HCIs), the visible part of technological products, by studying the impact of the two main interface characteristics—aesthetics and usability—while considering user emotions, ultimately aiming to improve the adoption of digital products. The EmotX project addresses the issue of how interface characteristics ( i.e., aesthetics and usability) and individual emotions influence the user experience.

EmotX is a multidisciplinary project, structured around three research teams (Human-Computer Interaction, Marketing, and Psychology), adopting an integrative approach to emotions that addresses two main complementary research questions. These questions structure the project into two tasks. First, it aims to study the role of emotions as characteristic responses to (low or high) levels of aesthetics and usability in interface design. This first task involves (1) comparing captured and self-reported emotional evaluations and explaining their discrepancies, as well as (2) demonstrating that emotional measures can be a form of evaluation of a problem related to the usability or aesthetics of an interface, something that, to our knowledge, has never been done before. Second, the research question is to understand the central role of emotions in interface adoption ( T2 ). This task allows us, on the one hand, (1) to analyze the impact of usability and aesthetics on positive emotions and their mediating role in user acceptance of an interface. It also allows us to (2) better understand the role of negative emotions in users' decision-making when faced with risk.

To implement these tasks, carried out in parallel over the 18 months of the project, EmotX is structured around two complementary case studies in terms of product benefits ( i.e., a hedonic interface and a utility interface). A qualitative and quantitative methodology is employed, including experiments to test the relationships between the variables of the proposed models. Each interface will be the subject of panel data collection, and a laboratory experiment is also planned for calibrating the measurement of captured emotions. For the purposes of dissemination and promotion, in addition to publications in international journals and conferences, feedback on the results obtained will be provided to our industrial partner ( i.e. , BAG-ERA) as well as in a popular science journal such as InnovatiO published by UGA.