Design Requirements for Web Applications to Affect the End User Emotional State

Abstract

We report on work aiming to identify Web design requirements to stimulate specific emotions. The results are based on a user test analysis with 50 participants evaluating the emotional impact of six different Web design criteria eliciting respectively hate, anxiety, boredom, fun, serenity, love. The design criteria applied come from a previous survey with 57 participants suggesting the main typical emotions during Web interaction and associating them with some specific Web characteristics. An additional user test with 40 users investigated deeper which design features are most important to elicit a particular emotional state. A formalization of such criteria can be important to support Web designers developing Web applications taking into account the user's emotional state.