Chang, Tsen-Yao
Achieving a balance between visual aesthetics and usability to enhance
user experience has enjoyed an increasing popularity in Web design. This
study combines creative drawings as intuitive probes to investigate
users emotional reactions and needs. The basic purpose of these creative
exercises is to inspire design researchers and practitioners into
applying a strategy in practicable design research to probe real user
experiences and create an enjoyable and effective user environment.
Emotional engagement with design is vital in design research.
Unfortunately, laboratory usability tests often involve complex
technical and mechanical tools that discourage user participation, thus
limiting the opportunity to receive feedback. The research exercise in
this study includes a series of intuitive practices that engaged the
participants as target users to sketch an imagined garden layout, a
library landscape layout, and a personal home page. We hypothesized from
their drawings that a connection exists among the users sketches, Web
interface preferences, and a classification of personality types.
Significant results were obtained: (1) Creative drawing is an effective
tool in understanding the personality of a user; (2) Three graphic
practices establish emotional connections with the users Web interface
preferences and product design; and (3) User personality categorization
reveals preferences in Web interface and product design. This study
focused on the effect of visual aesthetics and user-friendly methods on
usability assessments in response to the increasing emotional
conciliation of human-computer interaction design. These findings are
beneficial in keeping abreast with the developments in design creativity
and the qualitative contributions of design inspiration.
ICICE 2012, International Conference on Information, Communication and Engineering
