Towards a framework for the affective and emotional faces of usability

Abstract

Usability and accessibility have been guiding interaction designers in their endeavor for better user interfaces. Recently, emotions and human values are gaining space, demanding new directions for the design of systems. As an emerging subject, the need for models that associate emotions and affective quality with human-computer interaction design is still to be addressed. This paper presents a literature review and critical analysis about existing frameworks and models, organizing the state of the art in emotional quality, towards educational system design. This review puts in evidence the missing core in the subject. We then present the concept of Affectibility as the guiding point from which the use and design of system-user interaction could be treated. Similar to the concepts of Learnability and Playability, Affectibility refers to the aspects that make the system of good - or bad - affective, emotional and hedonic qualities, potentially evoking certain affective responses in the users.