Emotional Experiences and Quality Perceptions of Interactive Products

Over the past few years, various novel approaches have been applied to the evaluation of interactive systems. Particularly, the importance of two categories of concepts has been emphasized: non-instrumental qualities and emotions. In this paper we present an application of an integrative approach to the experimental study of instrumental and non-instrumental quality perceptions as well as emotional user reactions as three central components of the user experience. A study is presented that investigates the influence of system properties and context parameters on these three components. The results show that specific system properties independently influence the perception of instrumental (i.e. usability) and non-instrumental qualities (i.e. visual aesthetics). Especially the perception of instrumental qualities was shown to have an impact on the users’ emotional reactions (subjective feelings as well as cognitive appraisals). There was also evidence suggesting that context parameters influenced emotional user reactions.